What a time to be alive and listening to John Green narrate his book, Everything is Tuberculosis. I’ve been listening to it slowly because I am always on the verge of a rage stroke and I want to outlive the current administration. I listened to the last chapter and post script hours after reading that the Department of Education has decided that nursing is no longer a profession. I’m lucky to be alive.
Sophia’s review of Everything is Tuberculosis is probably better balanced, because I am writing mine in a rage. One of the things that I hear activists say to try to get people to care about things that are not happening to them is “whatever you allow your government to do to other people, they will eventually do to you” (quote attribution unknown). I thought about this quote a lot while listening to Green talk about the difficulties poor countries face in treating tuberculosis. As I’m listening to Green explain that wealthy countries like the US have prioritized corporate profits over public health in poorer countries, I’m also living through a government shutdown in which the current administration is using hunger as a weapon. The shutdown is partly because the party in power wants to make health insurance less affordable. Over the last several years I’ve watched the government allow healthcare infrastructures to decay, the right to healthcare be stripped away from people based on their gender, and in the last few months, the active dismantling of science based medicine.
In the postscript, Green talks about the choice we have before us – to remove the financial barriers to treatment and significantly reduce the number of people who die from tuberculosis, or to allow this awful but treatable illness to continue killing more than a million people each year. When Green wrote this, I don’t think he knew that the US government was going to go for a third option – worsen the social determinants of health for even more people, which will result in more people dying from tuberculosis and other treatable illnesses (it’s eugenics in action. Wheeeee!). We do still have choices though in how we respond to the dismantling of our health care system and the systems that contribute to good social determinants of health.