resources can get together to participate in the public arena. That’s
one of the reasons unions are so hated by business and elites
generally. They’re just too democratizing in their character.
So Navarro is surely right. The strength and organization of labor
and its ability to enter into the public arena is certainly related—
maybe even decisively related—to the establishment of social
programs of this kind.
There may be a parallel movement going on in California, where
there’s a ballot initiative to have single-payer healthcare.
The situation in the US is a little different from what Navarro
described, because business still plays an inordinate role here in
determining what kind of system will evolve. Unless there are
significant changes in the US—that is, unless public pressure and
organizations, including labor, do a lot more than they’ve done so far
—the outcome will once again be determined by business interests.
Much more media attention has been paid to AIDS than to breast
cancer, but a half a million women in the US will die from breast
cancer in the 1990s. Many men will die from prostate cancer.
These aren’t considered political questions, are they?
Well, there’s no vote taken on them, but if you’re asking if there
are questions of policy involved, of course there are. You might add
to those cancers the number of children who will suffer or die
because of extremely poor conditions in infancy and childhood.
Take, say, malnutrition. That decreases life span quite
considerably. If you count that up in deaths, it outweighs anything
you’re talking about. I don’t think many people in the public health
field would question the conclusion that the major contribution to
improving health, reducing mortality figures and improving the
quality of life, would come from simple public-health measures like
ensuring people adequate nutrition and safe and healthy conditions of
life, clean water, effective sewage treatment, and so on.
You’d think that in a rich country like this, these wouldn’t be big
issues, but they are for a lot of the population. Lancet, the British
medical journal—the most prestigious medical journal in the world—
recently pointed out that 40% of children in New York City live