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"COVAX and World Bank to Accelerate Vaccine Access for Developing Countries," trumpets a World Bank press release. "How AI Is Making Healthcare More Affordable And Accessible," announces Forbes magazine. "How technology is helping improve financial inclusion around the world," reports CNBC. It's a linguistic frame that appears regularly in media, PR, and policymaking. Those who can't afford the top-tier forms of basic necessities like housing or physical and mental healthcare, we're told, can have "access" to less expensive, lower-quality versions. Enter bottom-rung ACA marketplace plans, less effective COVID vaccines, homeless people living in train containers, scammy cryptocurrency apps, and clunky chatbot "therapists." After all, they're better than the alternative: having no healthcare, housing, or income at all. But why must having nothing at all be the only alternative? Why isn't it possible to ensure high-quality essentials for everyone? And how does media's repackaging of substandard necessities as "increasing access" and fostering "inclusion" serve to make the barbarism of austerity politics seem palatable, even benevolent? On this episode, our season seven premiere, we'll examine the trope of framing subpar material essentials as forms of "inclusion" for the poor or "increasing access" to important life saving and sustaining needs, exploring how media simply accept, rather than challenge, the manufactured austerity that allows this cruel stratification in the first place. Our guest is writer, artist and pod host Beatrice Adler-Bolton.
Season 7 premiere of the official pod of hexbear.net
The whole false scarcity thing is the thing that drives me into Lovecraftian madness. The sheer amount of normalization of the phrase "access to care" drives me up the wall. Or how we have replaced "healthcare" to "insurance" as the goal is just so damn wrong. I'm very lucky/blessed/fortunate to never really have any real need for physical healthcare or mental healthcare, however always deeply troubled by the ceaseless parade of nightmarish stories of people trying to get care. From people who are uninsured to folks who supposedly had "good" insurance, everyone seems to have a terrible time accessing their "access to" their care. I
Capitalists have convinced the liberals of the world that something very much not real is very much real. For the record, you are not crazy for not buying into the "Catastrophe or Ruination" dichotomy they false create. You are in fact cool and normal for proposing a third mystery option of "What if we didn't have to pick between those two?"
Neoliberalism/Late Stage Capitalism/Hellworld is all about buy into this idea of false scarcity when there is in fact abundance were there the political will. The current Media machinery and apparatus does so much of the heavy lifting for these MEGACORPS too.