Coronavirus Lockdown XXI: Why small is not beautiful in the time of pandemic
The global fight against health and economic crises highlights the need for big government spending and better redistribution to protect people, not less
- Jun 6, 2020,
- Updated Jun 6, 2020 5:44 PM IST
On June 5, when the US recorded more than 1.1 lakh deaths from COVID-19, maintaining lead and accounting for 28% of all such deaths in the world, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman revealed something about the US's health system few outsiders know.
In an article in the New York Times, he wrote, "Non-American friends sometimes ask me why the world's richest major nation doesn't have universal health care. The answer is race: We almost got universal coverage in 1947, but segregationists blocked it out of fear that it would lead to integrated hospitals (which Medicare did do in the 1960s.) Most of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would bear the great bulk of the cost, are former slave states."
And then, he adds, "The Italian-American economist Alberto Alesina suddenly died on March 23; among his best work was a joint paper that examined the reasons America doesn't have a European-style welfare state. The answer, documented at length, was racial division: in America, too many of us think of the beneficiaries of support as Those People, not like us."
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On June 5, when the US recorded more than 1.1 lakh deaths from COVID-19, maintaining lead and accounting for 28% of all such deaths in the world, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman revealed something about the US's health system few outsiders know.
In an article in the New York Times, he wrote, "Non-American friends sometimes ask me why the world's richest major nation doesn't have universal health care. The answer is race: We almost got universal coverage in 1947, but segregationists blocked it out of fear that it would lead to integrated hospitals (which Medicare did do in the 1960s.) Most of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would bear the great bulk of the cost, are former slave states."
And then, he adds, "The Italian-American economist Alberto Alesina suddenly died on March 23; among his best work was a joint paper that examined the reasons America doesn't have a European-style welfare state. The answer, documented at length, was racial division: in America, too many of us think of the beneficiaries of support as Those People, not like us."
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