PATIENTS’ INFO No. 7
The
hospitals are production plants exactly in the same manner as the factories
From: SPK-Documentation Part I
It cannot
be pointed out and emphasised enough that:
The hospitals are production plants exactly in the same manner as the
factories are. There, the patient has to deliver anything he has produced: stool
(faeces), blood, urine, gallstones, kidney stones, bladder stones, body parts,
headache, hallucinations, hypertension, states of anxiety and restlessness, etc.
These products are converted into doctors’ bills, laboratory bills,
administrative costs, etc. This way, illness flows into the treasury and for the
highest bid into the economic process. A tiny fraction returns to the patient in
form of hospital equipment, medicines, health care costs, etc. The consumption
of these consumer services yields new profits to the economy and the state. As
an alienated object, the patient behaves outside this profitability cycle that
is carried out with him, in a complete analogous way as does the factory worker,
who receives just as much pay as he needs to produce his workforce. The
illness he has produced is thus taken away from the patient for the purpose
of its transformation into money – money becomes capital. What he takes home is
by no means
health but it is the same wear and tear he has brought already to the
hospital, plus further and new damages during the course of the process of the
capitalist therapy (drug side effects and hospitalism
(psychopathological adaptation syndrome to the existing conditions, etc.)). In
the same manner as in the factory, the product illness, i.e. complaints,
symptoms etc., is realised and objectified lifetime, traded as the commodity
human being, not different from the alienated products, that the entrepreneur
takes away from the workers in the factory. If the sick person drops out of the
capitalist exploitation and valorisation process because his illness is
considered to be “incurable”, and that means nothing
else than that it cannot be transformed into profit and capital, then,
certainly, he has lost his significance as a producer also in the
patient factories. It becomes evident and obvious to him what it means, as a
sick person, to be nothing more than a
consumer of „services“ in an abstract way. He is
either no longer admitted to stationary treatment in a hospital, has lost his
right to a medical treatment funded by the National Insurance Board, is dumped –
for life – in the corner of some
state psychiatric hospital, or, in his dwelling environment, he is exposed
to the reprisals of his performance-minded fellows, who, certainly with loving
care, are riding roughshod over him treating him as a sluggard, useless eater,
or scapegoat. If he is not willing to let his illness be capitalised and
organises himself together with other patients, then – if there is no other
way – he is, as a not exploitable producer, excluded from the capitalist
exploitation and valorisation process in the hospitals by the
exercise of property rights. Who is not capable or willing to let his
illness be exploited and valorised, is not allowed to the hospital, because the
hospital solely has this one function – and this only had to be proved – to take
away from him the illness he has produced in order to give way to another.
Every
patient who wants to confront the ruling medicine consistently, should, by all
means and through all official channels, force all those who have stolen from
him his illness piece by piece to return to him its equivalent in form of the
capital accumulated by his exploiters.
Patients’ control practised consistently – and it must be practised
consistently – must start at the point where no longer the patient is the one
who pays the bills for the „services“, but the one who, in turn, presents the
capitalist health system via its function holders the long overdue bill.
What
matters is to unfold the contradictions of the institutionalised medicine from
itself in the societal context, and it cannot be the point to globally and
unconsciously welcome (cui bono? – welcome to whom?)
and promote any „medical activity and any medical
progress.” …
Socialist Patients’ Collective,
14.07.1970
Patients’ Front / Socialist Patients’ Collective, PF/SPK(H), 13.08.2017
The State of the World Is Illness. What Is to Be Done?
The Complete Concept of Illness
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