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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the large audience of Formula AS – mostly due to its comprehensive health column making available cheap and feasible remedies which allow readers to avoid expensive hospital treatments – reflects increasing social and economic vulnerability for the majority of people as a result of the destruction of industries and the privatization of health care. Written from the view of social philosophy, the paper highlights the striking role of media messages in this process.
Notes
1. See an analysis of the social capital factors necessary to political activism in Dragoman, 7–123.
2. As I tried to show in “The ordinary men and the social development”, a paper presented at the International Conference, “Theoretical and Practical Problems of the Development of Transforming Society, Yerevan, 16–17 April 2012, Armenian State Pedagogical University after Khachatur Abovyan, International Academy for Philosophy.
3. Petre (3–4) spoke about the present pensioners who left the villages for the cities decades ago and return for reasons of survival.
4. For 2012, http://www.formula-as.ro/raport-general/. See note 44.
5. I speak about premises, not about hypotheses.
6. I myself used these references in Bazac Citation2003.
7. In January 1859, the official modernization of Romania began with the unification of the two Romanian principalities, Moldova and Valachia was the last year before the Second World War, in which Romania was involved from the beginning.
8. The medical bureaucracy has been part of the state bureaucracy and it illustrates another criterion defining this complex intermediary category: of the realms it acts within.
9. In fact, there were procedures (for example, medical analyses) where the medical bureaucracy could not hide bribes.
10. The process of making up-to-date the industrial revolution was interrupted by the 1989 event. Instead of modernizing the productive and economic realm, the new ruling class – representing mostly the upper layers of the former political bureaucracy which became an explicit dominant class – crushed the units, factories, plants and institutes of research sucking their last profit, by destroying their capacity to be really efficient, by privatizing them and selling them even after they decomposed them into simple materials. This process, as with the entire rush to privatization, shows the huge difference between the progressive role of the bourgeoisie through the creation of new modern productive forces (Marx), and thus by constructing from green grass something precise with its own effort and applying a “protestant ethic” (Weber), and on the other hand the present stage of the world upper strata aiming at privatizing something already existing and subordinating the economic and social logic of society to finance (transferring most of the money in financial transactions). From this point of view, the conquest of the West by the American colonizers was more “honest” since they built an entire industrial civilization on the stolen ground; while the former state and collective ownership from “really existing socialism” was considered as an inimical land (with “leones”) that could not be but parched and appropriated.
11. Work-related diseases decreased from 1978 to 1989, and from 1990 onwards they increased, till 2002 (Todea and Aurelia 37).
12. Gross Domestic Product was 53.6 billion dollars in 1989, and afterwards decreased until 2003, according to Global Human Development Reports, UNDP, http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2009/, quoted in Mariana Stanciu 251). A decrease in consumption took place even in the periods of economic growth (1993–1995, 2000–2004).
13. Already during the social-democratic regime from 1990 onwards, the idea of the “saint private property” – AB: which is not tantamount to personal/particular ownership – and the unquestionability of methods of appropriating the publicly owned sphere directed the entire politics and ideology. Consequently, the envelopes have generalized and their content no longer reflected the financial ease or awkwardness of patients, but only the requirements of the doctors who began openly to show their quality as bureaucrats free to benefit from their function beyond the official rules. Just this antagonism between the post-1989 official statements about democracy and correctness – “not as before” – and, on the other hand, the real situation (everywhere, and not only in the health system) led to the fall of the social-democrativ regime, with the explicit right campaigning in the name of fighting corruption (and freely appropriating the public sphere). Thus, if some expensive dentistry materials became paid for immediately after 1989, in 1999 dentistry treatments and procedures became integrally paid – within the public clinics! – but the envelope has remained absolutely compulsory. See the synthetic article of Stan (56–71).
14. Kant’s categorical imperative (see its second formulation: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end”) could be a more precise form of the Hippocratic Oath.
15. This is the reason for the attack on universal health insurance, see Mazelis.
16. The exchangeability of things and activities does not imply their transformation into commodities, the only vectors of profit, but the objective social features of reciprocity and respect of every human. Things and activities could be exchanged without pursuing the profit of their providers but only the wellness of their recipients, without which they cannot fulfil a creative life. And certainly, this type of exchange involves a rational allocation of resources and limiting of waste, which depend not only on the level of scientific and technical knowledge but also on the organization of society. If modern commodities – being the result of a specific historical exchange pursuing private profit – have values which are transposable into precise figures reflecting the intercourse of inputs and outputs and serving the measurement of private profit, in de-commoditized exchange the products and services no longer have value, with people measuring and aiming only at reducing the waste within inputs and the increase of wellness at the level of outputs. In the modern economy, the exchangeability of things and activities in order to become commodities is their “socially relevant feature” (Appadurai, 13). In the model of a de-commoditised economy, the exchangeability is obviously a permanent, implicit as well as explicit, feature of things, but it is rather a “methodological” feature: the substantial feature is the main one and it consists in adequately fitting the things and activities to the concrete needs of people. This is the reason for the goal of de-commoditisation as a substitute for the goal of capitalist economic growth, see Wallerstein Citation2011. I owe the above reference concerning Appadurai to Sabina and Toma (56–71).
17. In the Orthodox Church, this relationship is stronger than in Catholic and Protestant Christendom.
18. Generally, constructed in the manner of the first industrial revolution, most of them were comfortable enough; only when the rhythm of industrialization in the 1970s became very rapid and, at the same time, the children of the first generation of post-1944 political bureaucrats grew and were consecrated as the new bureaucrats – thus social reproduction within the same bureaucratic category began to slow down general social mobility – some second-range buildings began to be constructed, compensating for the price of the increasing privileges of the political bureaucracy. But anyway, the rents were very low.
19. And not only in cancer or irreversible diseases.
20. Homeopathy was known and practised before 1989.
21. The magic and empirical Romanian medicine, based on the rich Romanian flora, was studied by the medical ethnographer M.D. Charles Laugier, who worked in Oltenia, a province in the south of Romania, in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
22. Acupuncture was known and officially practised before 1989.
23. Her treatments were explicitly popularized in Formula AS in 1992–1993. In 1994, her books were published and became bestsellers.
24. See for 2012, http://www.formula-as.ro/raport-general/, where the most popular articles are those related to troubles and their cure. Of 10 items, 8 are exclusively related to health care, one is the advertising of a new supplement of Formula AS, the monthly Asul verde [The Green AS] of 32 pages, devoted only to aspects related to health care, and another one tells about a singer who committed suicide.
25. See the informal campaigns – which took place in some media in opposition – against Initium and genetically modified animals and food.
26. If Engels’ Conditions of Working Class in England (1845) is considered too partisan, let us quote Gide (415); he demonstrated that in the same natural area, people from the poor strata live less than the rich, and the proportion and gravity of diseases are higher in the poor strata than in the rich ones. Later on, and critically discussing the ecological crisis, Fotopoulos stressed that “the economic and social implications of the ecological crisis are primarily paid in terms of the destruction of lives and livelihood of the lower social groups – either in Bangladesh or in New Orleans – and much less in terms of those of the elites and the middle classes, which have various ways at their disposal to minimise these consequences”.
27. Nowadays, there are agricultural techniques which have huge productivity even without using chemical stimulants, cloned animals and growth hormones, or genetically engineered seeds and cultures marked by herbicide glyphosfate. The biological and agricultural sciences are so developed that now we know what to do in order to have healthy food and lead a healthy life. We know in which proportions very processed food, artificial substitutes and simulacra of necessary matter to eat are dangerous to us. We know the proportions of fat, glucoses, carbohydrates we need or, on the contrary, which are dangerous to us. We know how much to eat without harming us. We also know how to care for the land/earth, in length and depth. But we face a chaotic world where, in the second decade of the third millennium, millions of people who are overweight live near millions who are undernourished. We speak about famine and hunger, even nearly 70 years after the Second World War, and obesity is related to the waste of food, transposed into the malnourished situation of the poor (working poor) and impoverished middle classes (as well as to the unhealthy way of living and sedentary or excessive regime of work). But the waste of food unites with the production of an enormous quantity of unhealthy, artificial food, promoted by aggressive advertisement. Imagine the enormous energy, creativity and material expenditures used for this production. Do they not waste the energy and matter of the production of healthy food? If it seems that there would not be sufficient money to invest in agriculture and the food industry, but at the same time military and armament expenditures are so high, we have to question the rationality of this repartition of expenditures. Is the military–industrial complex right to press for an increase in military expenditures, or is every ordinary man and woman right when reclaiming their right to food and more, their right to healthy food in order not to supplement it with teas, tinctures and oils?