Microplastics and the case for universal health care
Microplastic particles among sand grains. Credit: 5Gyres, courtesy of Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0.
In recent news, I learned that microplastics are everywhere. They're in our parks, oceans, the soil, the food we eat, and probably even the air we breath. Just do a search for "microplastics are everywhere", and you'll see a litany of articles spanning the political spectrum, the blogosphere and the mainstream news. Wow. Even the mainstream news can't ignore this story. What comes to mind is this:
Give a hoot. Don't pollute.
Plastic is everywhere because some of us choose to let it be everywhere. We dump it on the oceans, leave it to the wind in our parks, or toss it out the window on our road trip.
To get an idea of the scale of plastic pollution on our planet, our home, go here to the Guardian to read one article of many on the subject:
But the wholesale pollution of the land was hidden. Tap water is gathered from hills, rivers, lakes and wells, sampling the environment as it goes. It turns out that tiny fibres of plastic are everywhere.
Plastic is made from oil. That oil often comes from places that are perpetually mired in war. Carl Sagan said that extinction is the rule, survival is the exception. Microplastics seem to bear our this rule rather well.
Now that plastic is everywhere, who will clean it up? Who will pay to clean it up?
More to the point, what is that stuff going to do to our bodies? Who will pay for the healthcare we require when we discover the consequences of those tiny plastic particles getting into our bodies?
It is clear that consumers demanded plastic. We now have plastic everywhere as a result of that demand. Hardly a day or even an hour goes by without us touching plastic. Plastic is in our phones, our computers, our water bottles, our cars, and our clothing. My glasses are made of plastic. My shoes have plastic. Just about everything that I buy from the market has plastic in those nice shiny packages.
Consider again what The Guardian said. As water runs downhill from the mountains and the hills, it samples the environment and collects plastic particles. That goes into our lakes, farms, our food, the meat we eat, and the produce we pick at the market.
The ubiquitous nature of these tiny plastic particles will almost certainly affect our health. Will the oil and plastic industries pay for the deleterious effects of plastic on our health? They will bury any lawsuit in motion practice for decades and a ton of money with their army of lawyers. They will do everything they can to ensure that the health costs of their products are "externalized" so as not to touch their shareholders. Remember, in America, shareholders are the supreme rulers of our land.
If there ever was a case for universal health care, this is it. A universal tax on every form of income will be required to pay for the health care needs of people who have been exposed for a lifetime to plastic. The reason that such a tax must be universal is so that the burden of the cost of health care cannot be "externalized" by the corporations that make the products that make us ill.
Then, and only then, will the producers of the products we buy, start to think about the entire lifecycle of the products they sell. They will start to build the costs of waste recovery into all of their products.
Then and only then will people who carelessly toss their garbage to the side of the road, begin to consider the long term implications of the act of polluting the world. People who toss their waste anywhere, must know that nature is not a friend to plastics and nature will eventually evolved and adapt to plastics. I don't think it will be very long before we discover a microbe that eats plastic and the poop from that microbe turns out to be more toxic than the food.
This is not even a matter for debate. All of the technology we make, including plastic, has a pollution cost and a health care cost, and we cannot allow that cost to be shifted around so that the producers of the products we buy can escape the financial consequences of their waste.
The best way to pay for universal health care is to ensure everyone pays for it. That means there can be no deductions for this tax for anyone, so that there are no loopholes. If everyone pays, then the tax remains small, and it would follow that everyone would have access to the health care they need.
Write on.
I don't think that a universal tax like you're proposing would ever be possible. This might work between a coalition of certain countries, but certainly not globally.
On a more positive note, I do think that change is possible on a more local level. I'm fairly sure that the EU for example will implement their own healthcare system eventually, something that is more inclusive than some national systems in certain EU countries.
Local politics is the low hanging fruit of change. I've seen that here in spades in the US. While the big telecoms have the power to "repeal" net neutrality and inhibit ISP reform in Congress, hundreds of communities are building their own networks in response to the market failure created by the big telecom companies.
This idea of such a tax to support universal health care is inevitable. Tort litigation is expensive and a gamble for everyone. A small flat tax imposed on every form of income to cover the health risks we create through technology and civilization itself eliminates a ton of public and private bureaucracy.
No more means testing.
No more litigation with insurance companies.
No more insurance company administration for a profit.
I think that the current debate in health care is really a cover for the imposition of the protestant work ethic on everyone. That by itself is a violation of the First Amendment. The very idea that we can starve people into being motivated to take better care of themselves ignores the question of whether or not people even have the skills and knowledge to take care of themselves.
Huh. You might have inspired another article. :)
Thanks for your comment!
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Completely agree with you there, we live in an age where universal healthcare should be a right instead of an optional extra. Some countries do it better than others, I'm from Australia (and live in Netherlands) and I think that both countries (whilst not perfect) have decent systems in place, which are currently combined with a public/private healthcare insurance system as well. (They are also different to each other, on reading again, it may have sounded like that they were identical!).
We all dumped ourselves ( in varying degrees) together into this mess (both wittingly and unwittingly), and the best way out is together, supporting every person, as the effects of the pollution are non-discriminatory as well.
Agreed.
This is a subject I feel passionately about, and I've been planning to write about it for a while now. I did mention it a couple of weeks ago in a general post about waste, but I want to take a more in-depth look at the issue, as it's a burgeoning environmental catastrophe. In the UK we have a plastic shopping bag tax, yet many of the goods we buy in the shops – especially in the supermarkets – are individually wrapped in plastic. And as you say, it's the producers who are mostly to blame. It's a crazy and distressing situation.
I'm not sure that universal healthcare is the answer. I think an increased sense of personal responsibility is one way forward.
While I agree with your sentiment, I find it hard for people to take personal responsibility for pollution from businesses that strenuously resist accountability for their effluvia. A small flat tax to fund universal health care is like no-fault insurance. No matter what happens, you cannot shift the burden of health care onto someone else because everyone shares the burden.
By getting everyone to pay, and everyone covered, we can install a sense of personal responsibility at both ends. At least, it seems that way to me.
I live in the UK and we have the NHS, which I wholeheartedly support. But I'm not sure if it instills much of a sense of personal responsibility.
The sense of personal responsibility doesn't come from the health care service, whether public or private. A sense of personal responsibility comes from connecting the behavior to the outcome.
as of now there is a world wide health care issue happen in different countries, hoping that different government will have a join avenue to work together and solve different health care problems we have because if only one person will try to solve this no one will change. it must be pursue together with a join effort from each other.
Agreed. Thank you for your comment.