It is with no small irony that the world of finance, usually arrogant and so often unaccountable, was the first to collapse, showing that the continued and unfathomable circulation of money in the world relies on a resource we all took for granted: the health of citizens. Markets feed on trust as a currency to build the future, and trust, it turns out, rests on the assumption of health.
Modern states have traditionally guaranteed citizens’ health: They built hospitals, trained doctors, subsidized medicine and built welfare systems. This health-care system was the infrastructure that made possible trust in the future, which was in turn a requirement for continued investment and financial speculation. Without health and a healthy public, economic transactions become meaningless.
Health was taken for granted, so much so that, in recent decades, politicians, financial institutions and corporations in the West converged in pushing for policies that severely decreased public budgets for services ranging from education to health care, ironically ignoring the ways in which corporations had been enjoying the fruits of public goods they never paid for. All of these depend on the state and are the indispensable public resources without which economic growth and profits could not occur. Yet, in France, as just one example, 100,000 hospital beds have been eliminated in the last 20 years (at-home care does not compensate for lost hospital beds).