Since the start of the pandemic that’s killed more than one million American and disabled millions more, our power structure has been in denial about what really ails us even as the corpses piled up in refrigerator trucks outside compromised hospitals. 

A highly contagious infectious disease is only part of our affliction. Add in a case of willful blindness to healthcare profiteering, from the snake oil of Medicare Advantage to the price of so many prescription drugs. 

During the worst of the pandemic, the politically well connected New Jersey Hospital Association called the shots in Trenton. The industry group fended off calls for warranted higher staffing ratios and even the disclosure of the death of healthcare workers from COVID. Through it all, the public health and stopping the spread of COVID took a back seat to the hospitals’ bottom line. 

There still has not been a real reckoning for how this scarcity model of profit inspired healthcare  meant we had no inventory of essential personnel protective equipment like N-95s that resulted in the preventable deaths of thousands upon thousands of healthcare professionals. Realtime delivery was a death sentence for too many. Even now, Congress has failed to fund the follow-up appropriations needed to keep fighting COVID.

There’s a direct linkage between our profit driven scarcity model of healthcare and our elevated per capita COVID death toll. This is particularly true in the under served poor communities of color where deep disparities in access to health care were well established before COVID and indeed made those places more vulnerable to the virus.

Throughout the ongoing once in a century mass death event our political system has consistently revealed itself as completely inadequate to form a cohesive public health response that could contain the virus. While we account for just four percent of the planet’s population, over the arc of COVID we have accounted for three to five times that in our share of the total number of virus deaths on the planet. 

Our arrogance and self-possession prevents us from grasping these data points because it belies our self-image as the last standing super power.

COVID is a seismic event and there are numerous aftershocks like the 20 to 24 percent hike in health insurance premiums for New Jersey’s essential public sector workers which threatens to blow up  their household budgets and set off a local, county and local school board fiscal meltdown. 

We are told it’s just part of a “formula” that factors in what’s being called over utilization of healthcare during the pandemic. Could it be that the lack of a robust public health system before the pandemic drove up the cost of the response to this catastrophic event? So, the same essential workforce that kept society functioning at great personal risk, will now take a pay cut to pay for their health insurance to guarantee the health industrial complex’s obscene profit margins?  

Sadly, the response of Gov. Murphy’s office to the premium spike is near robotic, disconnected from the lateness of the hour and the anger people feel. Our elected officials are too often detached from the every day reality of the people they were chosen to lead and if they are super wealthy the disconnect appears to be more profound.

“The Administration is always looking to work with our partners in government and labor to seek solutions that will help us deliver quality health care at an affordable price to every New Jerseyan,” a Murphy spokesman told NJ Advance Media. “The governor is committed to making our state a more affordable place for working and middle-class families, and believes everyone deserves quality, affordable health care.”

What does any of that verbiage actually mean?

According to NJ Advance’s  reporting, the Murphy press operation offered up the creation of an Office of Health Care Affordability and Transparency “as one example of the governor’s commitment to addressing rising costs and making life more affordable for New Jersey residents.”

Could a blue ribbon panel be in the offing? Nothing like bold and swift action! Gov. Murphy has said this run up in health premiums is a national problem so why are we not using the 2022 campaign season to drive home the reality of the national health crisis we are in?

To anyone paying attention to the actual health of our population, our COVID tribulation and the rough aftershocks should come as no surprise. For three years before the pandemic America’s average life expectancy had declined. Ironically, the last time that happened was leading up to the WW I and the Spanish Flu years.  

For years our profit driven healthcare system has ranked as the most expensive in the world with the poorest outcomes among similarly situated countries. And just what do we get for that profit freighted cost premium?

As one of 38 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that includes the world’s wealthy countries, like France and Germany we actually rank dead last in terms of health outcomes for our people.

“The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia. The United States ranks last overall, despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care,” reports the Commonwealth Fund, a public health advocacy non-profit founded in 1918. “The U.S. ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes, but second on measures of care process.”

The Commonwealth’s global analysis continues. “Four features distinguish top performing countries from the United States: 1) they provide for universal coverage and remove cost barriers; 2) they invest in primary care systems to ensure that high-value services are equitably available in all communities to all people; 3) they reduce administrative burdens that divert time, efforts, and spending from health improvement efforts; and 4) they invest in social services, especially for children and working-age adults.”

In the throes of the worst of the crisis, when it was the Governors of New York and New Jersey who filled the vast void left by President Trump, who downplayed the virus, the entire focus was on preventing hospitals from melting down and scant attention to what was happening out in the community where so many people were dying in their homes. 

We would get to that later, after the crisis at hand was in the rear view mirror. And yet, well over two years into to a pandemic that still kills hundreds every day , the Biden White House could not convince Congress to fund the COVID programs experts say the country needs.

At a recent White House briefing, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, told reporters he was concerned that even as we were bracing for a winter uptick in COVID, a failure by Congress to fully fund the pandemic response left the nation vulnerable.

“If you remember, having enough PPEs for doctors and nurses is pretty critical,” Jha said. “We were going to have a national stockpile. We do not have an adequate stockpile of that or of tests because we had to pull resources to make sure that we had enough vaccines.”

Jha continued. “We do not have funding for the next generation of vaccines and treatments. Our COVID — or, sorry, our vaccine campaign has been more limited because of lack of funding. So Congress bears a lot of responsibility for the complexities of the moment we find ourselves in. You can’t run a national response to a highly contagious and deadly virus without adequate funding from Congress.”

We are having this conversation in October 2022 because there still has been no accountability for the government’s collective failure to prepare for COVID in the first place,  and then for its disjointed and incoherent response since.