The race to commodify everything has been gaining speed for centuries, and went into hyper-speed when our technological capability exploded in the 20th century. We often do not realize how deeply this commodification mindset has been ingrained into us by the dominant culture.
The main driver of this race to commodify remains the free-market capitalist, with his externalities (real-world costs that are not included in calculating value, such as environmental degradation) and his absolute faith in the omniscience of the “free” market.
What is commodification? The practice of valuing something exclusively for its use as a commodity (“an article that can be bought and sold, especially a product as opposed to a service,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary).
In North American capitalist culture, commodification typically usurps all other ways of valuing objects. This strips all objects of all possible value outside of monetary, and contributes to a very myopic view of the world.
In itself, commodification of objects is neither good nor bad – it just is one way of redistributing objects from those who have an abundance to those who lack and want.
For example, the family farmer selling her crop enables her to have money to buy seed for the next crop, or other necessities. In this context, commodification makes sense, assuming the farmer gets a fair price for her crop.
However, when commodification extends from actual objects, like potatoes, to subjects, like people, it can have disastrous consequences. Just ask the millions of Americans who have had to declare bankruptcy due to precipitous rises in medical costs.
In the U.S., human “health” itself has become a commodity, affordable only to those who can afford to purchase non-processed food and pay skyrocketing insurance premiums. The people with more money are worth more, in theory as well as in practice. Americans may think they live in a meritocracy, but instead are part of a klepotocracy.
Regulations to protect people from the deleterious effects of free-market capitalism have been relaxed in the U.S., particularly over the past 30 years. These include regulations on health insurance, financial institutions, and corporate conduct.
The scam that is the American health-care industry shows constant affronts to democracy and human rights by each of these institutions. Most of this is a result of the commodification mindset that we inherit from the dominant capitalist culture.
Canada is not immune to this mindset, even though Canadians have been less irrational about their full-body embrace of unregulated capitalism.
The indications are that Stephen Harper would follow in lockstep with U.S. policies of deregulation if he could, but so far the Conservatives have been unable to fully implement the faulty American model. My question is, why would they want to — particularly when it comes to health care?
The commodification of Americans’ health has not resulted in Americans becoming more healthy. In fact, it has made Americans less healthy, by denying coverage — which is effectively a denial of treatment — to those with “pre-existing conditions.” The result of this has been a shift from utilizing family doctors, who do not seem to exist any longer, to using emergency rooms as treatment venues of last resort.
I had to do this myself when I still lived in the States, as did my partner at the time – and it ended up costing over $1,000 per visit, which, lacking health insurance coverage, we had to pay out of pocket. We were not poor either – we owned a house and two vehicles – but health insurance costs were just out-of-reach for us. I imagine this is true for the vast majority of the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.
Nor has the commodification of health made care cheaper or more efficient. The health insurance industry is supported by a bloated network of medical billing firms and third-party interests who all take a cut of the fat profits the industry creates. There is also a focus by the industry on expensive interventions after a person is sick rather than less expensive preventative measures before he is sick.
In the wake of this profit-driven myopia is the wreckage of millions of people’s lives. There are the parents of chronically-ill children who re-finance their homes to afford treatment, and then lose their houses due to foreclosure when the housing bubble bursts. There are single people who get sick, and then get fired, losing their insurance coverage. There are those caring for elderly parents or relatives, forced to forgo their own health care in order to finance stays in nursing homes.
At the bottom of all these lives, which were wrecked for no good reason, are the fellow people that have been transformed by our mindset into mere objects, such as numbers on a balance sheet. The task of people who want to build a better world begins with a counter-transformation of these mere objects back into people, each who has a value far beyond monetary.