Like every year at this time, the same circus starts again. The Confederation announces cataclysmic increases in health premiums, political parties loudly proclaim that action must be taken, analysts explain that nothing can be done because the lobbies are locking down Parliament, and in the end policyholders are losing money and becoming poorer. This situation that is presented to us as inevitable turns out to be fabricated in reality when we observe it more closely.
Imagine, you bunch of insurance pigeons, that in Switzerland, it is perfectly legal for an elected official to sit on both the board of directors of a health insurer (being handsomely remunerated there) and on the Parliamentary Health Commission where the same elected official can influence the laws that affect his benefactor, as the president of Lobbywatch denounces in “Liberty” (1.10). This is not considered corruption!
Result: it happens that insurers directly write draft laws which are then submitted by their puppets under the Dome. Needless to say, it is rather on the right of the political spectrum that we find this type of parasite, who tell their less fortunate voters that they are there for them before implementing orders coming directly from the upper echelons of the money.
Beyond this manipulation of our laws by the richest bosses, there is the entire Swiss hospital system which has been remodeled according to a neoliberal design, with an obligation for results and treatment of patients and consumers. This is what the director of the Valais Hospital points out in Le “Matin Dimanche” (4.10), explaining that health is expensive “because we have made it a market which follows an ideology of growth and production”. It also highlights all the diseases caused by tobacco, sugar, ultra-processed foods, pollution or inequalities, therefore by the economy, and the inappropriate response of the legislator who systematically protects this same economy.
While the enormous profits generated by all these industrial shits which are murdering us are greedily swallowed up by an ever-tinier minority of gravediggers who do not pay taxes, profitability is imposed on hospitals which therefore malfunction. And strangely, during debates on health costs, we always come back to the fact that the insured are too spendthrift, but never a word about the ultra-rich who, not content with filling medical practices by poisoning the population, do not pay their share and therefore completely unbalance the health system (and society as a whole).
The recent and excellent documentary series Doing the Job on Arte (still available on the channel’s website), addressing unhappiness in business, explains that the new capitalist model consists of extracting all the value from workers in a minimum of time then throwing them bloodless to the side of the road, victims of burn-out and other pathologies, while the company continues its headlong rush towards the abyss.
Illness is an integral part of the contemporary model of work. Because preserving the integrity of employees would make money flow more slowly into the pockets of the hyperbillionaires, and there are plenty of poor people ready to ruin their health in the streets (they accept anything because they have to eat, these idiots!). Yes, capitalism eats away at the body and the mind. And it is not through negligence: it is the very essence of the system to create value by destroying lives.
Is it any surprise then that, in French-speaking Switzerland, one in two senior employees wants early retirement for health reasons, and that 70% of those over 45 want a reduction in working hours (“24 hours”, 1.10)? We no longer work for the pride of providing for ourselves, we work to pay for the medication and appointments with the doctor that will allow us to last until retirement!
At the same time, there is a widespread use of drugs such as cocaine during working hours, particularly in difficult jobs. Let’s call it self-medication. And let us remember that drug cartels are managed according to the precepts of ultra-liberalism and always end up merging with the financial and economic systems, as they are only the expression of a different facet of the exploitation of workers (and patients, which is exactly the same thing).
Is there nothing to be done to counter this machine of crushing policyholders? We should start by stopping voting for sellouts. But as the ultra-rich use the money they divert from taxes to build gigantic propaganda apparatuses intended to make the good people believe that the problem comes from foreigners, homos, trans people, women, wokes, communists, in short anyone other than the ultra-rich, a majority of the inhabitants of the planet vote against their interests and elect the faithful lapdogs of their exploiters… With such errors of diagnosis, the bounty disease is not close to being over. neat!
This text and this drawing can be found with a host of others in issue 723 of “Vigousse”, the little French-speaking satirist, on newsstands (or in the mailbox, for subscribers) every Friday.
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