> If the US had universal healthcare, this would be less of a problem.
Italy's socialized healthcare apparently didn't cut it. There are plenty of examples of the existing U.S. healthcare bureaucracy royally screwing up in the covid response.
Do I'm not buying the logic that an even bigger bureaucracy is the solution to Kafkaesque bureaucracy, at least not for this problem.
I especially don't understand people who are railing on the responses of Trump or BoJo also arguing that the U.S. president should be even more in charge of this sort of thing.
On the one hand classism purports to be a motivator: if people just work harder, they can improve their class standing and buy more stuff; on the other, it's just a variation on aristocracy: some people are better than others, and they are wealthy people, it's an indisputable fact of their superiority that they can buy more and better versions of the basic things that we claim form a civil society.
If public institutions are incompetent in a democracy, how is it the culture isn't also incompetent? Incompetency and aristocracy are not civil institutions, yet we've managed to institutionalize them both by just making excuses for them.
Some of the stuff described in the article is really unfortunate and all too often an outcome of a large bureaucracy. That doesn't make it okay. They need to come up with better procedures and err on the side of making sure people don't deliver while infected and that they get any sick pay they deserve.
Supposedly, there's a stimulus package coming out that may help give some people relief as well. And I think we need a whole lot more emphasis on preventative measures generally for this pandemic.
If the US had universal healthcare, this would be less of a problem. If we solved some of our other issues, like our housing supply issues, this would be less of a problem.
Blaming the distress these workers are experiencing entirely on the fact that they are gig workers isn't reasonable. That's just one piece of the picture here.