China's "Lost Generation" and our flawed healthcare policy - Connected?
Maybe so.. A little bit of history. In the mid 1960s, China had a big problem. Millions of young people, many with college educations, but stagnant economic growth and very few jobs. In fact, like our economy today, the economy was contracting in many areas.
In nations, social scientists have shown that ruling elites historically, start wars when demographics have made their hold on power slip. Now that wars are SO destructive, ruling elites are experimenting with other ways of eliminating the pesky demographic.. large numbers of unemployed youth. This is PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT when jobs are vanishing.
The way we are doing it here is by artificially making older people much more expensive relative to younger people than they are in civilized countries.
We are disemploying the old to employ the young, with insurance policy.
But, back to Chinese history. The young people were restless, as they would be here, without the boost that making old people such huge liabilities through a barbaric insurance policy does, because jobs would be harder to come by.
In Europe, for example, even the countries with private insurance charge people the same for basic comprehensive coverage, and pay for it transparently, so people are NEVER hit with huge bills. In fact, typically, there are no bills at all.
Historically, when a nation's ruling elite feels that their dominance is threatened by a changing demographic, they start wars.
Mao's first response to the large numbers of young people without jobs was to mobilize millions in a period of political orthodoxy now famous as the so called "Cultural Revolution".
Anybody who lived through this time can tell you, it was terrifying. Millions of people were killed or sent to prison, many to die of starvation. Millions more lives were ruined because of alleged rightish sympathies or connections. Although not as brutal as Cambodia's US-financed Khmer Rouge, the Red Guards killed hundreds of thousands of teachers, Buddhist monks, and everyday people who had been caught in a curious misinterpretation of a statement of Mao's that "95% of Chinese are good" to mean that 5% were bad and had to be done away with to purify society for the dawn of a new era.
Just a little tip, when leaders seem determined to sweep away the old and replace it with the new, for no reason other than it is new, or young, RUN. Thats a sign of a dangerously narcissistic leadership.
Our current healthcare policy is needlessly destructive of people's lives.
Its unfair, just as China's destroying a whole generation's lives to preserve a ruling elite's hold on power was.
The United State's healthcare policy is so destructive in that its designed to sweep away older workers, even when those older workers are doing their jobs well, even when those older workers worked decades to work their ways up through the ranks, many in lieu of college diplomas, in order to artifically disemploy the over 35 or 40 and employ the young. (For that reason, it promotes the rapidly escalating level of social stratification that has rapidly made the US an increasingly difficult place for even the most hard working poor to become wealthy in the developed world.)
Jobs are vanishing and many are making good arguments that in 20 years machines will do most low paid jobs. Other countries are being far more honest about the changes in the workforce due to Moore's Law, etc, but the US is in denial.
Is one reason for our insurance policies to hide the coming changes and effectively to bribe the youg with artificially available jobs- and prevent civil unrest?
Many older people find themselves unable to get jobs just when they seem to be beginning what should be their prime earning years.
Health insurance policy, in particular, seems designed to ration care so that many people who get sick cannot get well. Premiums now and the coming age tax, seem designed to artificially terminate the healthy, working lives of people in their prime earning years, deskilling professions into jobs and and replacing the skilled professional with young, inexperienced, semi disposable workers, often for the simple reason that in our upside down world, they are cheaper to insure.
Why are our policies designed to create this effective subsidy for young people's careers at the expense of the old?
I think that there is a very simple reason. Young people demonstrate, young people often have so few entanglements that they can and often do speak their minds, young people even sometimes fight for change, older people rarely can or do.
I've had this pointed out to me by European friend who is convinced that the US's seemingly brain dead insurance situation is actually a crafty way to allow the ruling class to maintain a situation that would be intolerable without the active buying out of the younger generation - or a war - with a draft, or a "solution" like China's..sending millions to the country to "learn how to farm"...
For the sent-down youth, their interrupted lives, their enforced relocation to rural areas interrupted their futures, and lowered their expectaions in a way not unlike the effect of a intentionally bad insurance policy does to those over 35 or 40 in the US. (Even the college educated in late 1960s and early 1970s China, became lucky just to get enough to eat.)
He also pointed out to me that insurance companies are in effect performing a service to the government by delivering such terrible healthcare in that it shortens the lives of the poor, saving the government billions in Social Security benefits.
Anyway, thats it..
Comments?
Groupthink and avoidable disasters..reading..
China's great famine: 40 years later
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine by Jasper Becker (portions available on Google Books)
The China Great Leap Forward Famine: The Lasting Impact of Mothers’ Fetal Malnutrition on Their Offspring
and many many more..