Virus is socialism’s best recruiter

A pandemic makes all of us a little bit more socialist. That’s because a virus does not respond to market incentives. It threatens absolutely everyone and is by definition a collective threat, as the term “community spread” reminds us. Containing it requires all of us to focus on the common good and respond to calls to altruism.

Those who can survive the coronavirus, especially the young, are thus asked to take genuinely inconvenient steps, less to protect themselves than to mitigate the damage it could do to others, especially the old.

Understanding and defeating an epidemic requires a government that can effectively organize easy testing for millions which is exactly what we haven’t been able to do so far.

But this means counting on competent, forward-looking agencies. Advocates of small government cheer “cutting bureaucracies” until we discover we need the bureaucracies that were “streamlined.”

Thus has President Trump come under criticism for eliminating two teams set up to plan for, and deal with, health crises. His nasty word salad responding to the thoroughly appropriate inquiry about this from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor at his Friday news conference shows how vulnerable he must feel.

As Laurie Garrett noted on Foreign Policy magazine’s website in January, Trump ordered the National Security Council’s

“entire global health security unit shut down” in May 2018. It was set up by President Barack Obama after the Ebola crisis. This followed the dissolution of a center at the Department of Homeland Security charged with monitoring epidemics.

People who feel they might have coronavirus have a responsibility to get tested, right? But guess what?

Those tests cost money. Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., did a whiteboard exercise at a congressional hearing last week when questioning Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services.

First, she used her board to show that when emergency room costs were included, the price of a battery of tests would come to $1,331.

Then, she got Redfield to acknowledge that he would like, in his words, “all of America” to be tested. Finally, she pressed him to “commit to the CDC, right now, using [its] existing authority, to pay for diagnostic testing, free to every American, regardless of insurance.”

He was forced to give in to her logic. “I think you’re an excellent questioner,” he said, “so my answer is yes.”

There you have it: In at least the one sphere of coronavirus testing, sheer common sense got a Trump administration official to agree to a smidgen of socialized medicine.

Free testing was part of the “Families First” bill the House passed early Saturday morning that also includes initial other steps toward socially responsible policies, including family and medical leave coverage and enhanced unemployment insurance. If it’s in everyone’s interest for everyone to get tests, it’s also in everyone’s interest for the government to finance them.

Another way to contain the virus and the deaths it can cause is for sick people to get the care they need. Broad health insurance coverage and an excellent public health system are vital to this end.

No, I don’t expect this emergency to get members of the Business Roundtable to start singing “Solidarity Forever.”

But you would like to hope it would encourage a bit of rethinking among those who regularly hate on government bureaucrats, denounce experts as useless elitists, claim the market can solve every problem, and lament what a terrible imposition it is when workers’ rights and benefits are imposed on our “job creators.”

Might they now acknowledge that some problems can only be dealt with collectively through public action?

Yes, and also the shared aim of securing protection against a silent and invisible killer.

Markets are great at determining who produces the best stuff most efficiently.

But life is about a lot more than stuff. And efficiency is not the only value.

There’s fairness, compassion and our responsibilities for one another.

There are dangers out there that none of us can deal with alone.