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without actions like that taken by the thai government, what capitalism effectively is saying is that the lives of the children of the affluent are worth more than the lives of the children of the poor.
in other words, the extension of capitalist market relations into areas like medicine is itself unethical.
what it amounts to is the subordination of the physical well-being of people in the southern hemisphere who are poor to the profits of trans nationals based in the northern hemisphere. i see no way to justify that ethically.
2. i see no problem---at all---with state funding of pharmaceutical and other medical research because it functions to remove aspects of medicine from the context of capitalist market relations.
even within the ethically impaired context that is the united states, state funding is already the underpinning for this illusory (see the article i bit above) rapid advance in research. without that funding, i think much ongoign research would collapse. this because it appears that big pharma treats research costs as externalities, these corporations presuppose state funding, they rely on state funding. so you have all the problems of unequal access to drugs based soley on income WITH such funding and its elimination would only make an already repellent situation much worse.
if anything, because in the present context expansion of state control is the simplest way to reduce the impact of capitalism on health care, i would favor its radical extension---universal health care is a basic human right and its provision is an infrastructure function. the sorry history of neoliberalism implemented over the past 20 years has amply demonstrated that market relations never increase efficiency in infrastructure areas, and that the whole idea that they would has been proven over and over again to be nothing more than a neoliberal fantasy.
not only do i not see a problem with this, i do not understand what the basis for arguments to the contrary could possibly be.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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