I'm not convinced a hospital is the best place to heal the sick. Indigenous health outcomes got a lot worse after colonisation, even when Indigenous people weren't classed as fauna. A lot of Indigenous people get diagnosed with a serious illness, travel hundreds of kilometres to a hospital, and die there. Because at the hospital, they're isolated from their family, their community, their home, their country. I grew up in white culture, and I still find hospitals to be isolating places as a patient. It's gotta be way worse for someone who didn't grow up in that kind of environment.
Instead, imagine a travelling doctor service where the doctor has hours to get to know you while they treat you, where you feel valued as a patient. The biopsychosocial benefits should be obvious. There's just one problem: patient volume.
Fortunately, communism has some great solutions to the patient volume problem. For example:
- No more tobacco companies
- No more gambling companies
- No more financial incentive to push hard drugs
- No more financial barriers to preventative medicine
- No more 80 hour workweeks to support your family
- No more dangerous working conditions in the name of profit
- No more fossil fuel companies
- No more car pollution
Capitalism makes people sick in the name of profit, and then sells them the cure. In a communist system, doctors would have more time to treat their patients like people.