Peter Kropotkin, what do you say about the high cost of medical care in the USA?
I never wrote about “health insurance” or “hospital billing” but my essays on poverty and scientific cooperation make my position on American medical costs extremely clear. I consider the U.S. medical system—not just flawed, but illogical, immoral, and structurally violent.
I believe Medical Care Should Be Free Because Health Is a Human Need. Anything necessary for survival—food, shelter, clothing, water, and health care—must be treated as a common good, not a commodity. I believe needs are non-negotiable. Humans require medicine, doctors, and treatment to live, and these must be freely available, universally, and without barriers. Survival itself as a right, not something to purchase.
Unfortunately, capitalism turns human needs into opportunities for profit. The High Cost of U.S. Health Care Is a Product of the Profit System. In the U.S., health care has become a business, a market, a source of profit for insurers, corporations, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies.
I disagree with all that. I believe charging for Medical Care Is Immoral and Irrational. It is absurd that society allows a person to die because they lack money, when society itself produces all necessary resources.
U.S. health care is expensive because pharmaceuticals monopolize patents, insurers monopolize approval and deny coverage, private hospitals prioritize high-profit procedures, corporations control access to treatment and medication, health is treated as a private commodity instead of a public good.
I believe The U.S. System Violates the Principle of Mutual Aid.
What I Propose Instead is a fully free, fully universal, fully cooperative health care system.
no insurance companies, no patents on life-saving medications, no medical debt, clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies collectively run, medical research shared openly and globally
Health must be organized around need, not profit.
I insist that medicine, like food and shelter, is a right of all, not a privilege for those who can pay.
In Summary, I believe the high cost of U.S. medical care is manufactured by capitalism, immoral, irrational, and unjust, completely fixable only by abolishing profit in health care
Medical care must be free. Anything less is inhumane.