Universal healthcare would help dismantle the state’s ability to sustain societal violence

The fact that the resources necessary for good health are not universally accessible, but instead variable and conditional on factors such as race and socioeconomic status, shows that healthcare is not always considered a right and is instead often treated as a commodity. This is especially true in America, where privatized health insurance is a multi-billion dollar industry, in comparison to other countries with single-payer, nationalized insurance. While there are inequities in health outcomes even when there is nationalized insurance, they are often smaller, as illustrated by this study on comparative health outcome disparities in the U.S. and Canada, and this one on decreased health outcomes disparities in Taiwan after the instatement of universal healthcare.

Any discussion of how health and healthcare are administered and controlled by the state would be incomplete without the framework of biopolitics. Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, summarized here, suggests that the post-industrial state used health and life as tools of oppression, selecting some populations for enforced and controlled living in order to contribute to the production of capital (‘making them live’) and marking some populations as discardable (‘letting them die’). He posited race as the ‘divide’ between who was made to live and who was allowed to die — the function of racism was to distribute death unevenly across a population. Achille Mbembe’s responding theory of necropolitics takes Foucault’s concepts a step further, and proposes that the death of Black folks and others discarded by white capitalism is not a benign process of abandonment, but rather an active process of murder on the part of the state. The deprivation of health through various mechanisms, including access to healthcare, is a tool of state violence.