Capitalism only cares about money and how to use it to produce more, not about people caring about, or caring for, people. Almost 60 years ago, MLK, Jr. warned us, in these prophetic words challenging the moral integrity of our nation, about the root of the problem and the need to set it right:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
But in our society, if you’re not making money for someone else to accumulate, regardless of your job, you’re not of any value. Which tells me that our society, and the logic underlying it, is ruled by Mammon—a society where machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are still considered more important than people, and the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism have yet to be conquered.
From a personal perspective, seeing the push from the execs at the top to make providers see more patients and essentially make Providence look and function more like Kaiser while laying off more and more people, taking away printers and monitoring how much each person prints to save money is awful. Even the providers are getting tired of all the money talk, and it’s just another illustration how capitalism infects everything. A religious, nonprofit healthcare provider shouldn’t be acting just like every other for-profit organization. But the logic of the system makes everyone and everything function the same whether they want to or not.
When they say there’s no alternative to capitalism (as Thatcher loved to say), it’s primarily because it actively prevents socioeconomic alternatives from being able to function and survive, and the governing system forcefully intervenes when any large and potentially successful alternative emerges (mostly in the form of economic and military attacks on states experimenting with alternative socioeconomic systems). And while I knew this going in, seeing both the culture and quality of care deteriorate is emotionally draining, mainly because I’m genuinely proud of and enjoy being a medical assistant at a clinic where people truly care about the patients, and I believed in the ethos of ‘know me, care for me, ease my way.’ But that’s increasingly becoming just a meaningless marketing slogan as they try everything in their power to increase productivity, maximize profit, cut costs, and condition future providers to think in terms of numbers and billable codes and not intimately knowing their patients.
And as much as I dislike and blame upper management for this, they’re being compelled to do it by the underlying logic and overbearing economic pressure of capitalism itself. So as much as we target them for blame and criticism, their hands are being forced by something more fundamental, and that’s what we need to target and change. But that level of change is inherently difficult and destabilizing, and the people who benefit from it the most will fight hard to prevent it from happening, so it usually takes a major confluence of events to reach a point where a sufficient number of people, or at least those in key positions of influence in society, are willing to agree to such a change or force the issue. And since I don’t think we’re there yet, it leaves me feeling helpless and hopeless as I watch patients of 20 or 30 years lament how it wasn’t like this when the Sisters of Providence were running things, or how they don’t feel as cared for, or are told all of a sudden that their insurance is no longer contracted and they can’t see their doctor anymore.
I’ve never had a job that I both loved and felt was meaningful and paid a somewhat livable wage. And I’m slowly watching capitalism eat away at all three of those things, leaving me feeling like a cog in a giant, unfeeling money-making machine that doesn’t really care about how the money is created or distributed, only that the machine keeps grinding on and on and on, and sucking up every natural and human resource until there’s nothing left of the world to drain and it dies. I think that’s what anticapitalists like MLK, Jr. fear the most. Even if that future is generations ahead, they can still see where the world is heading and they try to plant the seeds for an alternative future in the desperate hope they bear fruit before that apocalyptic future comes to pass.
And that’s just a long-winded way of saying I’m sad and discouraged and wish I could do something besides continue to care as much as I can, push back against that culture as best as I can, and treat each patient like a person giving them as much of my time, attention, and compassion as I can. But eventually, that’ll make me more of a liability than an asset, and I may be the next to go (or give in, sell my soul, and work for an actual for-profit company and get paid a little more for being a slightly more willing and complicit cog in the cataclysmic, capitalist consumption machine).
