The Cost of a Pulse: When Healthcare Becomes a Weapon
There’s a growing belief in some circles that public healthcare is outdated. Inefficient. Bureaucratic. A relic of a time when collective wellbeing still held political value. And to be clear: public healthcare systems are not without fault. They can be slow, underfunded, and frustrating to navigate.
But to discard them entirely—to hand over the care of human life to private corporations—is not reform. It’s capitulation. It is the quiet opening of Pandora’s box, giving permission to psychopathic CEOs and marketing departments to redefine what it means to be healthy.
And in doing so, we don’t just invite profit into medicine.
We cede control over the very definitions of life, illness, and worth.
In a fully privatised system, healing becomes a financial liability. There is no incentive to cure when you can medicate indefinitely. There is no value in prevention when managing symptoms sells better. And there is no humanity in care when every patient is a number, every diagnosis a sales target, and every life an asset waiting to be monetised.
We are told this is “choice.”
But when the majority have no other option, it’s not choice—it’s coercion.
This is where the system reveals its true shape. Not as a neutral market, but as a tool of structural violence. When access to healthcare becomes contingent on wealth, the majority—those without financial cushion, without private insurance, without political power—are effectively held hostage by the very institutions meant to serve them.
They are forced to navigate a gauntlet of paperwork, denial letters, hidden fees, and suffocating debt. They are punished for being poor. For being sick. For surviving.
This is not healthcare. This is economic subjugation in sterile clothing.
It is, in every meaningful sense, a form of modern slavery. Not of chains, but of conditional access. Of gatekept survival. Of the slow, grinding erasure of autonomy through dependency on systems that profit from keeping people just well enough to function, but never well enough to be free.
The cruelty is not accidental. It is baked into the business model.
We must stop pretending that the market will save us. The market does not have a conscience. It has a quarterly report.
Healthcare is not a product to be sold to the highest bidder.
It is a public good, a collective covenant, a moral obligation.
To abandon that ideal is to declare, in no uncertain terms, that only the rich deserve to live with dignity. The rest? They can rot quietly, as long as it doesn’t hurt the stock price.
The fight for public healthcare is not about nostalgia.
It’s about survival.
It’s about preserving the idea that a society is only as strong as its compassion, and that health is not a luxury—but a birthright.
Because the moment we allow healthcare to become a weapon, we’ve already surrendered. Not just our rights—but our humanity.
