Elysium--Denying Healthcare as Crowd Control

 

Elysium: Denying Healthcare as Crowd Control

My husband and I are huge science fiction fans. We couldn’t wait to see Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium this summer. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium) Sure, there were other sci-fi action-thriller movies to be seen, but the enticing trailer for Elysium itself, and the fact of how much we enjoyed Blomkamp’s District 9, promised more for our always-stretched movie dollar.

Elysium as a film didn’t disappoint, but its premise posed many more questions—disturbing ones—than it attempted to answer. And, several weeks later, it keeps me awake at night.

First off, why would the near-future world posited in Elysium, filled with advanced technology that can cure disease and injury almost instantaneously, co-exist alongside a planet filled with such crippling poverty? It just doesn’t make sense. Or does it?

In my opinion, a near-future scenario of an Earth on the brink of collapse was last successfully realized on screen in the 1973 classic Soylent Green. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green)
 The Millennial Generation may laugh at
the idea of a heavily overpopulated planet, degraded and polluted by trying to
feed too many mouths and ruled by a small, secretive elite of the mega-wealthy, but they’ll have to realize that the Pill and abortion on demand weren’t freely available in the first half of the twentieth century. The assumption that we’d have way too many humans on the planet by the turn of the twenty-first century wasn’t so hard to put out of mind in 1966 when the Harry Harrison award-winning novel Make Room! Make Room! (which the film was based upon) was published. The thought of overpopulation and a dying planet posed a very real threat in the minds of the powers-that-be.

In Soylent Green, it is food—the very essence of how a living, growing organism stays alive—that is manipulated and managed to keep the masses in check. No food source—no living. Furthermore, the masses are indoctrinated by the elite that it is both noble and proper for them to commit suicide in order to thin out the ranks. There is no need for a heavily armed-presence or too much overt violence (although there are some telling riot scenes where police brutality is evident) to control the masses if the masses do the killing and self-killing themselves as they are slowly starved to death and talked into suicide.

After all, the elite classes only need a handful of human workers at any one time (who are much cheaper to “create” than androids or robots) to serve, manufacture things, run machinery, have sex with, etc. The poor, starving billions are as easily used, abused, and disposed of as paper cups—and self-destructing paper cups at that.

How convenient for the one percent! Give the poor a few guns, feed their prejudices against other groups who look or act differently, and they’ll take care of the problem for themselves. Brilliant.

Once the idea of crowd control, of implementing an efficient way for those at the top of the food chain to keep the masses in check, is discerned in Elysium, then more of
the unanswered questions present and explain themselves. Although it is set only
a mere one hundred-forty-one years into the future, Elysium hints that the advancement of technology in the fields of space travel, medicine, manufacturing, and computers has been able to solve many of the more pressing problems we experience currently in the world of 2013. With the advanced technology evident in the massive space-habitat ring of Elysium itself and the Med-Pod that cures all disease, obviously human beings in the future are capable of great things.

So, why would there be a need for slums and for little girls to die of leukemia? Why would there be a need for millions of workers working at
slave wages and under extremely unsafe conditions, as Matt Damon’s character Max
does? Why motivate these slave laborers with a carrot-and-stick promise that if they prove themselves “good workers” they might just be able to afford a ticket to go to Elysium one day just as Max has wished for since he was a boy?

Ah… could it be? It’s that control thing, yeah?

Once the motives of pure greed and a naked desire to execute absolute
power are eliminated from Elysium what else is there to explain the plot? Jodie Foster’s character, Secretary of Defense Delacourt, is painted as a military-dictator wannabe, a fascist-in-training, but there’s more to her—and her fellow citizens of Elysium—than pure greed and hidden-fascist dogma. After all, they all dress well, speak well and drink the right wines. In spite of their sanitized, movie-star-glamorous
lives, their motives to keep Elysium to themselves are much more base. They
want—no, it’s more likely need—to possess total control over the billions who dwell below them on the one planet where they receive the raw materials needed to maintain and grow their utopian world in space.

They, the elite, the one-percenters, secretly acknowledge that they cannot live without the input of the ninety-nine percent, but they dare not let on how dependent they are upon the unwashed and self-unaware masses. To do so could mean that the masses would demand equal access to all the blessings of technology and healthcare… and once the masses have access to healthcare and a decent lifestyle, would they consent to work for next to nothing?

Can it be that simple? How could the Elysium elite motivate their slave laborers without threatening them with the stick of no healthcare access? They do possess advanced military technology, and Delacourt demonstrates she isn’t afraid to use it. But like most fascists, Delacourt and the wealthy citizens of Elysium realize how difficult it is to maintain crowd control through the use of weaponry alone. Even well-paid mercenaries, such as Sharlto Copley’s sociopathic character Kruger, can’t be trusted to serve their masters all the time.

To maintain crowd control, the elite of Elysium have only one option: denying healthcare in order to convince the slave workers of Earth to keep themselves in line. The elite only has to indoctrinate the masses with the idea that if they become soldiers in the elite’s cause then they are dying for a greater good—not for increasing the profit margins of the one-percent. (Overtones of Soylent Green and suicide centers, but something else there rings a bell. Hmm.) 

The elite can dangle carrot-like promises in front of the masses, “You’ll only suffer for a little while if you go along with our plans,”
and expect most to believe the lie because it is as attractive as the beautiful green wheel in space rising above their dust-brown slum cities. “Some day soon you’ll become one of us and have access to the miracle of healthcare for you and your families if you keep your fellow slaves from agitating for equal access to it
now.”

Wow. And here I thought I was reviewing a movie. No wonder I can’t sleep at night.

My British husband calls it the “I’m all right, Jack” syndrome. As long as you keep your head down, allow your one-percent masters to call all the shots, encourage your fellow slave laborers to off themselves in desperation to survive, you’ve made it. You’ve survived long enough to gain a chance at joining the well dressed citizens of Elysium. (But there’s no real guarantee they’ll let you into their exclusive country club, is there?)  You’ve made it…but at what price?

I hope only the price of a movie ticket. Go see Elysium. Discuss it with others. And please leave your comments below.

2011: The Year Without Health Insurance

In January, I started off 2011 with my blog post 2011: The Year Without Snark, a plea for more civility on the Internet and in all our personal communications. Thanks to all who commented or have taken the pledge seriously and are doing your best to eradicate snark in all its nasty forms.

This month, I’m tackling yet another example of uncivilized behavior apparent in the world today, particularly in the good ol’ U.S.A. You’d be correct in assuming this is a piece about the unfair current state of health care in this country. What you might not have guessed is that I, your dear blogger, am caught in the middle of the whole sordid mess.

Yes, I’m one of those Americans who *gasp!* are currently without decent health insurance.

Since there really is no “emergency back-up plan” for Americans once they’re unemployed (or the family member whose insurance plan included them becomes unemployed) other than the ridiculously expensive COBRA option, we go overnight from being freely allowed in the front door of a doctor’s office if we have a complaint to being told (sometimes politely, sometimes not) to get lost. I think the acronym COBRA says it all—we are transformed into poisonous snakes who aren’t worthy of a fairly priced (or free for those who can’t afford it) health insurance plan. And the fear of snakes is a very common phobia indeed.

So we are forced to choose between health care and food and shelter. After the last month of record setting low-temperatures and snow dumps in the Midwest, guess which items we chose to fund? Well, we didn’t quite freeze and we didn’t eat like kings, but we’re still here.

At the prodding (read: demanding) of my mother, I finally found an overpriced, super-high deductible, temporary health insurance plan we can barely afford to tie us over for at least six months. However, I hold little hope that it will actually help out much should the need arise. If the deductible is more money than you have, and you’re currently unemployed and living on your meager savings, how the heck are you suppose to meet the deductible? Will a surgeon perform emergency surgery knowing you’re only going to pay him a small fraction of the bill? I suspect hospitals routinely use these temporary health insurance cards for toilet paper for all their worth.

To be honest, I carried my defunct insurance card in my wallet around for a while, so overwhelmed was I at the prospect of being denied medical help. I figured if I was in a coma or knocked unconscious, the paramedics or police would rummage around in my purse and find the said lapse insurance card and assume that I was properly insured and would give me the emergency medical care I require. Only after I became conscious and they found out the truth would they have been forced to kick me out of my I.C.U. bed and tell me not to come back until I could afford treatment.

Yes, it is a worse case scenario, and I do have an overactive imagination I’ll admit, but somehow I get the feeling this scenario is based more on fact than on fiction.

Since no one enjoys a whiner, I direct your attention now to a blog written by a friend who expresses her concerns over the current healthcare debacle quite well:
souptonutts.blogspot.com

How can we prevent our fellow unemployed/underemployed citizens from discovering their health isn’t important as those with money and power just because they’re not carrying around a current, decent health insurance card? You do wonder if the darn cards aren’t made of platinum or gold… In some way, perhaps they are.


ADDITIONAL: I'm currently reading Inside WikiLeaks by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former insider who describes the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon. One of the more interesting quotes I've come across has to deal with a leak about a German pharmaceutical company.

...The public didn't take much interest in the files we published in November 2009 concerning a German pharmaceutical company. If I had to name my favorite leaks from that year, these files would definitely be among them. They read like a case study in corruption and can be easily understood by laymen.

The files concerned payments made by pharmaceutical representatives to doctors so that they would prescribe more of the company's medications. We published ninety-six pages of investigations carried out by police and prosecutors. They detailed the practices used by some pharmaceutical company representatives. If doctors prescribed their patients those products, they received a cut of the additional profits. Moreover, there were direct payments. In an internal e-mail, one of the company's regional directors had written, "If a doctor wants money, call me and we'll find a way." Another means of encouraging physicians to prescribe more of the company's products was to give them coupons for expensive seminars.

---from Inside WikiLeaks, pp. 50-51. (Daniel Domscheit-Berg with Tina Klopp, Crown Publishers, NY)

It does make one wonder who really is driving healthcare costs through the roof--the doctors, the insurance companies or the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, we'll blame (and double bill) the patients... After all, they can help it if they get sick or injured, can't they?