The distribution of income has always been the basis on which our health, and our access to medical care, has been determined. Wealth and health have always been closely entwined. My local paper recently published an article on poverty, ill-health and longevity as it applied to the town in which I live.
It is widely recognised that poverty is an important cause of ill-health. To put this another, more controversial way, it is the wealthy that cause the ill-health of the poor; because it is the rich and influential who decide how income and wealth are distributed. Let me explain.
The mechanism of poverty creation can be quickly summarised.
First, we should recognise that, at any single moment in time, any organisation has only a finite amount of disposable income/wealth to be distributed between interested parties.
So, if there are 10 people working for an organisation; and the organisation creates 100 units of disposable income/wealth; and each person receives 10 units, there is no inequality. Each person receive 10 units, and there is no affluence, and no poverty; and so an equal access to health services.
But this is rarely what happens. We should not complicate this simple picture with concepts of the ‘worth’ of a person, or what he/she adds to the organisation’s ‘growth potential’, or the ‘value’ any one person might add to an organisation; or even digress into a discussion about the rights and wrongs of income/wealth distribution.
So when the person(s) in control of an organisation decide to take a bigger share, the other 9 will receive less. This is where inequality begins. And it applies at whatever level, or organisation we choose to focus on - to a family, to a company, to a country. Poverty is created by the decisions taken, usually by the powerful, to take a larger share of an organisation’s distributable income.
So if the boss, or person in charge, or the shareholders, et al, decide to take 20%, the other 9 will each receive a share of wealth under 8 units.
And if those in control decide to take 40%, the other 9 will receive just over 6.5 units. Then, if the foreman demands more than 6.5 units, the other 8 will receive even less. And so it goes down the chain.
At the end of this process we have created poverty. And we know, it has always been self evident, that poorer people have more ill-health, more disease, and earlier death. And this has always been the case.
Wealth is created by any organisation in two separate ways. First, it charges more than it needs for the product or services it provides. In so doing it contributes to the impoverishment of those who purchase those goods and services at a high price. Second, it pays those people who work to make/provide the products or services as little financial reward as possible.
There has always been inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. Our history demonstrates the very rich have always lived side-by-side with very poor people, and that how income and wealth is determined depends entirely on the decisions and values of those who control the group or organisation in question.
So in Britain the decision maker, or “the boss”, was once the Roman government, and levels of inequality was based on military power. This ability to appropriate the lion's share of wealth then passed to the Angles, the Saxons, and the Viking invaders. Then it moved to Kings, to ‘Royal’ families, and increasingly to the Barons. As land-owning became more important to the creation of wealth it moved to the aristocratic, or landowning classes. With the industrial revolution it moved to the newly-rich industrialists and merchants. Then multinational companies were formed. And now we seem to be subject to a small but powerful numbers of multi-billionaires.
Each ‘boss’, at each stage in history, is able to establish their own rules, and seek to justify the mal-distribution of income and wealth, based on his own self-interest.
Wealth is not just about the ownership of private jets, and yachts. It is about ownership and control of the organisation.
At no time has there ever been an effective mechanism to decide how rich rich people are allowed to become; or how poor poor people can be; or to successfully moderate the difference. Taxation has been tried; but now government’s are telling us that this is not possible, the rich are too important to tax; just as some companies have become to “too important” to fail. We have developed the idea of a ‘minimum wage’ but they have become little more than a safety net to avoid the worst scenarios of impoverishment: they have never been implemented at levels that actually avoids the creation of poverty.
What is clear that it is always the rich, the powerful, the influential who determines the distribution of income and wealth. It follows that they also control our health, and our access to safe and effective medical treatment.
The Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment is now one of the biggest culprits in creating vast wealth, and therefore extreme poverty. This article, for example, describes how “CEOs of BioNTech, Pfizer, J&J and Merck Make List of Highest-Paid Pharma Execs”. And I have recently written about how one Big Pharma company, Eli Lilly, can increase the price of one of its drugs, Mounjaro, by over 170% - overnight.
Drug companies are remarkably successful at creating wealth, and spending that wealth to control the health market.
It needs to be recognised that this has always been the basis on which our health, and access to medical care, has been decided - throughout the world - from time immemorial. And once this is recognised we must accept that it is income and wealth that determines how good, or how bad our health, and our health services are:
the amount of money we can spend on food, and the nutritional value of that food;
how much exercise we have;
the extent to which we can control stress levels in our lives;
whether we are able to afford the health treatments we are offered;
and much more.
So the decisions made by the rich and powerful have always had a crucial impact on the health of poorer people. Never was this more so than when, in the 18th century, the enclosure movement began the process of moving people from their (modest but viable) agrarian roots, forcing them from their rural communities into the new towns of the industrial revolution. The “industrial revolution” led to large sections of the population to living in squalid, sub-standard, insanitary homes, working in atrocious conditions, for unimaginably long hours, for poverty wages, and with poor nutrition and diet. None of this was conducive to the good health of working people. As usual the ‘revolution’ benefitted only a small group of the new rich. And it was achieved at the expense of the poverty (and ill-health) of millions of people.
The poverty of the late 18th and 19th centuries, created by the new wealthy industrialists, triggered devastating epidemics of infectious diseases, like cholera, influenza, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and yellow fever. The regular epidemics of infectious disease regularly killed many thousands/millions of people.
However, the devastation they caused became a problem, even for the rich. This was not directly the result of people dying in large numbers, but because the workforce on which the new wealth was created was being decimated - and/or recruitment to the national army was being seriously affected.
And so our modern concern with health began.
These epidemic diseases did not affect everyone. Walk around a Victorian graveyard, look at the tombstone inscriptions, and you will see that many people still lived long lives, well into their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and beyond. These were, of course, the people who could afford to purchase gravestones! They were not the poor, living in sub-standard housing, working in squalid conditions, with a poor diet, etc.
The wealthy people killed in epidemics, usually in small numbers those who succumbed to them as a result of life-styles based on over-indulgence rather than poverty, thereby undermining their immune system, and thus their susceptibility to disease epidemics.
So the concept of providing health care to everyone developed in many of the wealthier countries of the world arose from the need for a healthy workforce, and a strong army.. The regular disruption of epidemics were unwanted. So as the 19th century progressed health philanthropy took hold. So UK politicians, for instance, focused their attention on developing public health reforms, better housing, cleaner water supplies, improved sanitation, increased wages and better nutrition, and universal education. Gradually the health of working people improved, back close to where it was in pre-industrial revolution times. As public health conditions improved fewer people became susceptible to infectious disease epidemics which gradually became fewer, less severe, and less disruptive.
Health insurance schemes in Britain began in the early 1900’s. This meant that money became available to anyone able to offer health services. By this time the cause of epidemics had been linked to newly understood ‘germs’. Pasteur (wrongly, see this link) attributed these germs as the cause of epidemics. And it was not long before the drug industry realised there was money to be made by creating drugs (and later vaccines) to kill these germs. And since then they have done so, making huge profits, and gaining control of health care.
Ultimately in 1948 on the National Health Service (NHS), a service ‘free for all’ regardless of income and wealth. Similarly other countries followed suit, making health care widely available to all in different ways.
The pharmaceutical industry realised that government money was, in effect, a bottomless pit - as long as they could convince patients that they needed their drugs, and that government should be supplying them - regardless of their safety, or their cost. So, from an industry that had hitherto been steeped in failure, it became the most profitable and wealth industry in the world.
It was fortunate for the pharmaceutical industry that they soon realised they had to keep the ongoing failure of their drugs, and the regular health scandals they produced, from the public (their customers). So they were able to use their huge wealth to ‘make up the rules’ and ‘control the agenda’, even to change the history of health care!
So politicians were brought on-side by pharmaceutical lobbying, the strongest of all industrial lobbies.
Conventional medical treatment soon become almost entirely dependent on drug treatment, and increasingly they have not been in a position to question, criticise or investigate the harm caused by the drugs they were using.
The mainstream media, many of them struggling to survive, was bought into line with drug advertising, etc.
The compliance of medical ‘science’ was similarly controlled, bought and paid for by pharmaceutical profits.
And Drug Regulation, set up with the single purpose of protecting patients from dangerous drugs/vaccines, was successfully infiltrated and taken over.
This is how the rich have always operated. They have always oppressed the poor, and made the rules through which society is governed. Over the last century the Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment has taken effective control of most of the sources of information patients might have that might inform and protect them from a dangerous medical system. Moreover, decades of extraordinarily successful promotion and propaganda has convinced most people that they depend on pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, and that they could not survive without them.
This is why the travesty and tragedy of the Covid-19 Pandemic was able to happen - the rich in control, the poor helpless, feeling that they had no option but to conform.
Meanwhile, courtesy of adverse drug/vaccine affects, illness and disease spirals out of control. It is chronic disease that are the new epidemics. Allergy, arthritis, autism, dementia, diabetes, heart/liver/kidney disease, et al, are all now running at epidemic levels, and rising, and all of them, at least in part, courtesy of adverse drug reactions. And we are still scared, almost out of our wits, by the pharmaceutical narrative: about the regular threats of infectious disease, fears generated by a pharmaceutical industry that has no safe or effective treatments for them.
We have been processed to believe that we are all under serious threat - and we that need the pharmaceutical industry to save us.
This is no more or less than rich powerful elites have done throughout the ages. There is an enemy.
We have to defend ourselves from the threat.
The poor must form the army, go to war, and if necessary, die.
Only than will the (wealthy) Establishment be able to prevail!
