The aff’s lies about universal healthcare for the “public good”and economy is just an excuse to expand the state’s authority over their lives

More often than not this idea of “public” is deployed to isolate a certain section of society and exclude a whole class of people – namely the non-hardworking British taxpayer – as a non-participant. The best example of this is the Public Order Act of 1986, a set of laws that have long been mobilised to criminalise protest and industrial action. Framing the rioters, the insurrectionists and the dispossessed not as of  the public but as its enemies, it has long served to fabricate a mythological public good whose interests are actually the interests of capital. In the case of public order, it is the dispossessed and workers who are deemed public enemies. However, in the case of public healthcare, this role has fallen to those who are seen to put the most “strain” on the resources of the NHS: smokers, drinkers, addicts and the overweight. We must not reify these two categories of the dispossessed and the undeserving sick, for in reality they are largely the same people. Smoking, drinking, substance abuse and comfort eating are all coping mechanisms of those most impoverished in society. It makes sense therefore to call the NHS public, but it was certainly never ours.

We want to argue instead that the social democratic dream of welfare has in fact never not exerted a punitive and biopolitical power. In using the term “biopolitical” here we mean to refer to the state’s management of a population as a collection of living individuals, whose health and life processes are to be administrated and governed in the interests of a capitalist state. Biopower is a modern form of power that seeks control over life and death in a way that differs from the classical monarchical power to “let live and make die.” Biopower is not merely prohibitive, it is also productive, aiming at creating and enforcing on the population an obligation to conform to certain biological and health norms. In other words, the power to “make live and let die”. Instead of existing for “the health of the nation” the distribution of healthcare in Britain has existed primarily to preserve certain forms of life over others. Under this logic, the health that is mobilised is distinctly functional, simultaneous with the mobilisation of a working, productive population, working well enough only to effectively submit to waged and other forms of labour. What the popular opposition to healthcare reform lacks, therefore, is an agitation for health for its own sake.

Social theorist Michel Foucault notes the ways in which power exerts itself through institutions such as public healthcare along instrumental and biopolitical lines. This notion of making live and letting die sheds light on the more sinister aspects of healthcare. Health is not an uncomplicated and liberatory concept, but instead an enforced state of being for particular economic ends. This logic is traceable in the previous prohibition on suicide and the current prohibition on euthanasia. Whereas previously one’s right to health and life was deemed to be property of God, it has now entered the jurisdiction of a capital-oriented state. Welfare has always existed as a tool to shovel up the broken lives spat out by capital, rehabilitating them enough only to be re-inserted into a productive economy. Left-wing demands for a healthcare system have misguidedly championed the return to a halcyon NHS, but we argue instead for an overhaul of the disciplinary logics that have governed it since its conception.