Marx

Dashiell Winston
          March 29, 2010
        Wren   ISF 100A

            Health Care
On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law a nearly $1 trillion health care overhaul that will for the first time make insurance coverage the right of every U.S. citizen. This is the biggest expansion of American government and the social welfare state since the implementation of Medicare in 1965. A few of Karl Marx’s theories and concepts such as alienation of labor, political economy, historical materialism, and ideology are quite relevant concerning this article.   This historic bill could very well be interpreted as a shift from Capitalism to Socialism and as Karl Marx projects, eventually Communism.
The process of “alienation of labor” as Marx describes in his Manuscripts of 1844 is a great example to help understand how the health insurance industry was working before the historic Health Care Bill was passed. Our health, that which enables us to work, also undergoes the same dialectic process of alienation as labor.   The health insurance industry in America used to be allowed to only insure health care if it was considered productive. As a result, our health was being transformed into a commodity, which is then turned into a profit for those who control the health insurance industry. It is no longer our own, but instead the insurance companies that are profiting from owning our health care.   Marx expresses his theory of alienation by stating, “the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him...” (Tucker 72)   Once we are unable to produce our health, we are no longer insurable and as a result, become alienated. Not only are we alienated from our health through insuring it, but we are also alienated from our very own bodies.   Hopefully, the extensive measures being put into place by the...