COVID-19 shows the inequalities of our new Gilded Age in healthcare, employment
In 1915, the unsinkable luxury liner The Titanic on its first voyage hit an iceberg and sank. It carried 1,317 passengers and a crew of 905. Survival rates reflected the First Gilded Age’s stark economic inequality.
Percent of first-class passengers saved: 61; second class, 42; third class (steerage) 24; crew 22.
In 2020 during the Second Gilded Age of the coronavirus pandemic, more lifeboats are available for those with wealth and celebrity. Fewer will survive among “steerage and crew.”
To begin at the top. In early March Gwyneth Paltrow flew to Paris wearing a $99 “urban air mask,” featuring five filtration layers. Similar boutique masks were selling out, while business executives began chartering private jets.
A Florida private jet company offered flights to New York costing about $20,000.
Meanwhile hospital workers faced a shortage of N95 masks at $10.69 a box.
In many hot spots it’s tough for critically ill patients to get tested. Doctors and health care workers have struggled to get tested. No waiting for at least eight NBA teams, including the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers.
The Nets organization said it paid a private company to do the testing. With games still being played, a Utah Jazz player tested positive prompting the league to shut down and teams to seek testing.
A members-only medical concierge service quickly tested at their homes at least one hundred wealthy New Yorkers. It did not identify its clients from finance, entertainment and advertising.
In contrast, Dr. Jake Deutsch, director of New York-based Urgent Care, in mid-March began offering tests to walk-ins of all socio-economic backgrounds including those on Medicare. And UK Health Care recently offered drive-through testing for its frontline health workers and care givers with symptoms, with plans to expand testing.
We know that old age and pre-existing health conditions make the virus deadlier (I check both boxes). To those two causes research adds low-socio-economic status.
Among the 34 developed economies of the OECD nations the U.S. has the greatest inequality of wealth and income, creating inequities in health that will metastasize as COVID-19 ravages the least well off and least able to cope.
How do the homeless “shelter in place” or even “socially distance?” How do those delivering groceries and take out to affluent residences “self-quarantine?”
The millions of low-wage workers now unemployed will be far more vulnerable to the virus. So will older residents of rural areas where more than 100 hospitals have closed in the last decade.
Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans have more underlying health conditions than whites, and much lower rates of health insurance.
Both whites and minorities are at greater risk in the fourteen states where Republican governors refused to expand Medicaid to cover low-income people.
An ongoing epidemic of “deaths of despair’ among middle-age white men and women from suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol ravages left-behind places of economic devastation. More jobs vanish and already frayed bonds of community further weaken.
The tidal wave of event cancellations and postponements leaves multitudes of hourly workers without income and the necessity of finding work at the risk of exposure. That threatens all of society.
Add single parents, parents of children with special needs, and the mentally ill to the roll call of those most at risk.
Yes, Prince Charles, millionaire athletes and film stars have tested positive. But medical experts say it will devastate disproportionately the poor, unemployed, the marginalized, and people of color.
The $2 trillion stimulus bill—loaded by lobbyists with special deals benefiting the affluent including Trump’s family—addresses these disparities but falls short. More is needed. And the clock is ticking.
Ron Formisano is the author of “Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor” (Johns Hopkins, 2015)