An Unhealthy Ideology

By Andrea N Lopez Huizar / Spring 2021

The first day I moved to El Centro, which is a small town at the Southeast of San Diego, California, I was a little bit nervous, but at the same time excited because I was moving to a place where I would meet new friends, new places and new customs. I remembered that on my way to my new home, I saw a lot of homeless people in the sidewalks. At that time, I did not put a lot of attention to this. I just kept listening to music on my earphones, as adolescents usually do. My expectation at that time was to improve my lifestyle, since in Mexico, United States is recognized as the country of opportunities.

However, during my first year of high school, my expectations took a 180-degree turn, as I got involved in the reality. First of all, as I started to meet people with my non-fluent English, I realized that most of the students in this high school were passing through poverty, since most of these students have parents with diseases or injuries that did not permit them to work. I was impressed every time I heard those tragic stories.

The most heartbreaking story that I heard and experienced was about a friend of mine, who had her mother diagnosed with cancer at the time I met her. She was really desperate because the hospital of the town did not provide the necessary treatment for her mom, since her medical insurance did not cover the payment of the treatment, and her family did not have any way to pay for it. In addition, her father could not provide her mother’s treatment because he had advanced diabetes. As a result of this disease, the doctors cut off one of her father’s foot, and he need to be medicated for the rest of his life. My friend was in a very critical situation because she did not want her mother to die, who was the most affected at that time, so she started to look for part-time jobs and some of her friends, including myself, gave her some money to help her reach the goal. She got depressed, but she was always hopeful, and she thought that one day her mom would stop suffering for this horrifying disease. Unfortunately, after a few months passing through this situation, her mom and her dad passed away due to complications from their diseases. She got devastated and more depressed. I really felt so bad for her because of her sorrowful experience, but at the same time I was confused due to the fact that her parents died at an early age.

Another factor I observed when I went to high school was that there was a huge number of students with obesity. I thought that those students were passing through this health problem due to the food provided at this school. What I noticed in this school was that most of the food that was served was basically frozen food. I remembered that the cookers heated up the food with the microwaves and ovens that were supplied inside the cafeteria of the school. There was a calendar that indicated the type of food that was served each day. This varied from hamburgers to pizza, nachos, corn dogs, chicken tenders, and others. All of these foods were accompanied with potato chips and juices that had high-sugar content and fructose. I also met high school students with cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. I was curious about this problem due that I was not informed about these severe diseases at that time, since I did not see that at the private school that I went in Mexicali, Mexico.

As the time passed by, I understood that these adolescents were not the problem and neither their parents nor the cookers of the cafeteria. As one of my friends from high school said one day, there is paint that has been hiding the bricks for a long time. Unfortunately, it has been a really long time because the government had been hiding from its people that the economic system of America has being influenced by an ideology that caused negative changes in the whole nation’s wealth since the 1970s. If you look deeply into the way that this country works, you can clearly see that the problem had always came from the government and big multibillionaire corporations.

Before we discuss about the reasons of this economic issue, we must first need to explore at the superficial ways of seeing this problem. According to the videoclip Wealth Inequality in America provided by Politizane, says that the distribution of wealth in America was inequitable, as the middle-class individuals are barely distinguishable from the poorest people in America, which is approximately the 80% of the citizens in the country. However, this videoclip also states that the rest of the 19% of the Americans were rich people, and the remaining 1% was extremely wealthy that this person contains about 40% of the entire nation’s wealthy. This shows that there is a huge economic inequality in America. It also reveals that most of the population in America is currently happening through poverty at this current time. Now that we discussed about the economic inequality in America, we must examine about the consequences of this economic issue.

One of the effects caused by this profitable issue was that almost the whole nation is passing through a lack of necessities, especially the lack of food in their tables. Since some of the Americans make about less than $30,000 dollars annually, they do not have enough money to provide food to their families due to the fact that they need to pay the rent and bills first. To look deeper at this issue, we can take into account the life of Safiyyah Cotton, who was a single-mom of a one-year-old child that worked at McDonald’s as a way to support herself and her child. The article How This Single Mom Survives on $7.50 an Hour by Whiteside and Naik reveals that Cotton needed to borrow money from banks and be supported by government assistance, in order for she and her son to survive due to the fact that she counts with a monthly budget of about $480 dollars per month. This evidence helps us to see the cruel reality of poor individuals who struggle everyday economically to get a place to sleep and a plate of food to eat. In addition, when these people do not have sufficient money and sources to maintain themselves, they usually ask for monetary aid at banks or other related companies. As a result, they would continue to get into dept because they would not be able to pay the borrowed money on time, making these types of companies wealthier because of the high-rates of interests that are going to charge them in the future.

Also, we can consider the testimony of Mary Turner who talked about her life in the documentary Unnatural Causes. During her testimony on the episode “In Sickness and In Wealth”, she comments that she occupied a place in a poor neighborhood of Louisville, KY, who lived with her three children and her husband who had a disability that did not allow him to work, meaning that her family got maintained by just one minimum-wage salary. As a consequence of this, she states that their average budget for their food per month was between $125 to $175 dollars, in order to kept her family accommodated and fed. This is an another example of what a low-income family pass through. Usually, these types of families do not have other choices more than frozen food, since these types of foods are considered to be cheaper than non-processed foods such as fruit, vegetables, meat, and others. Therefore, these families do not live healthy lives, since the healthy food is unattainable for them. 

I know you are thinking that this is normal because you had seen that most of the people who consume junk food every day, they can do their daily lives without any problem. However, this inequality should not be normal, as there is one more consequence that it has to be take it into account. Since the low-income families do not get the sufficient nutrients that their bodies require to sustain, they tend to pass through severe illnesses such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, or diabetes. To support this information, we can observe the article of This is Your Body in Fast Food conducted by Christy Brissette, which remarks that having a poor-quality diet consisted in junk food was linked to have higher risk of obesity, digestive issues, heart diseases, diabetes, and cancer. As a result, a lot of low-income families are projected to suffer from these diseases and need to be treated with a physician or specialty doctors, in order to be cured, or at least to control their bad conditions. Unfortunately, most of these people do not tend to treat their illnesses, even if they have severe problems due to the fear of getting in debt with expensive treatments that are not able to afford.

Some of them even die due to the fact that they do not have any way to pay for their treatment. To help us make sense of this point, we can turn to the work conducted by Alaa Elassar named A Nurse Revealed the Last Words of his Coronavirus Patient: ‘Who’s Going to Pay for It?’. This article was based on the experience of the nurse anesthetist Derrick Smith, who treated coronavirus patients in New York City at that time that the outbreak of this infective virus began. Smith says he felt horrified when he heard the last and heartbreaking words of one of his coronavirus patients, which were, “Who’s going to pay for it?”, referring as who was going to pay his medical assistance. If we read between the lines of what Elassar says, we can clearly see that the patient felt worried about his medical bills, even that he knew that he was not going to be able to recover. I understand that the patient was worried about his treatment bill statement because he did want to make his family get in dept by paying all the hospitality and treatment that he used. However, how can a patient who knew he was going to die worries more about his economic issues rather than saying goodbye to his family? This is something that we should take concern, as he may not be the only patient who had thought about his nasty bills before dying. Many patients had experienced the same thoughts like the patient of Smith before dying because they did not want their families to pass through this type of economic issues, since they already knew that their families do not have the way to pay the huge amounts of dollars that hospitals requested to pay.    

Now that we have seen the depths of this economic problem in the healthcare pattern, we can consider that this current movement called “Neoliberalism” is affecting the whole nation regarding social formation and equality based in economics and health. According to Kean Birch in the article What Exactly is Neoliberalism?, neoliberalism is defined as an economic system in which the free market is extended to every part of the public and personal worlds. To look deeper at the following idea, we can take into consideration the article Neoliberalism – The Ideology at the Roof of all our Problems, that was wrote by George Monbiot. Monbiot states that the freedom that neoliberalism offers, seems to be freedom for the pike, not for the minnows. In other words, neoliberalism turns out to be more favorable for the huge marketing companies rather than for its consumers, which is technically the middle-class and poor individuals.  

As a result of this dominant ideology, a lot of these free marketing companies are abusing their power, as the only thing that they care about is to find effective ways of rising their profits. Based on Monbiot’s article, trade unions and collective bargaining suppress the wages of their employees, endanger their workers during their shifts, and charge high rates of interests to their labor men, due to the power and the freedom that these companies currently have. This article supports the following claim, as most of these low-class people do not get fairly paid by their bosses for the labor that these individuals provide for their corporations. These corporations tend to minimize the wage of their workers, such as the wages of Cotton and Turner. Nowadays, it is impossible to live a decent life with a job that offers you $7.50 dollars per hour, and much less when they have to provide food and necessities to their families. Additionally, some of these corporations do not take care when their employees got hurt or sick at their work. They do not support them economically even when they know that he or she got injured during labor. Therefore, their workers miss their shifts, lose money, and owe banks money to pay the treatments that require to heal from their injuries.   

In addition, Naomi Klein’s article The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism reveals that neoliberalist people tent to use the crisis to practice unpopular policies while American people were distracted. The idea of Klein adds credence to my claim, as most of the neoliberal corporations are not used to pay federal taxes. Surprisingly, most of the companies that practice neoliberalism reported that they owe nothing to the Internal Revenue Service, even that they earned billions of dollars in profits each year. This is due to the fact that the corporate tax rates for these companies are low, making the amount of tax avoidance to decrease until zero. As a result, since the corporate tax rates are favorable for these companies, they do not pay taxes, continue to earn profits, and become even wealthier. Unfortunately, this is a huge obstacle that prevent us, as a society, to live a better and decent life in a more equity way.

Fortunately, I strongly believe that we are on time to reverse this social hierarchy, but we, as society, need to act up hereinafter. First of all, government should increase the corporate tax rates to all the companies, including the ones with neoliberal ideologies. This would help to force these companies to pay their corresponding taxes, making the Internal Revenue Service to obtain more funds and currency that can be used as a way to provide better medical insurances for middle class and poor people. As a result, a lot of poor individuals who have severe illnesses and are not capable to pay their hospital inquiries and treatments would obtain medical insurances that would cover all that they need to be cured or treated. Also, these funds could be used to provide better medical supplies at hospitals.

In addition, these funds obtained could also be implemented in creating food programs for the society. One example could be to make a program in which commits to provide more non-processed food to students in schools, in order to prevent these kids from cardiovascular diseases and obesity. By doing this program, none of the processed food such as corn dogs, pizza and hamburgers would be permitted inside of the school anymore. This would help for students not to consume excessive calories and sugars in a daily day basis. Therefore, with a balance diet and an extracurricular activity, the number of students with severe diseases would decrease as most of the kids would live a healthy and better life. As a consequence, the students would be more capable to perform better in classes, and the death rate of children would decrease tremendously.    

Finally, another proposal could be to force an increase of wage salaries for employees. By rising the wage salary in America, a lot of individuals would be able to sustain themselves with food, rent, and necessities. This could be beneficial for poor individuals, as they would be able to provide a diet rich in nutrients and minerals for them and their families members. Therefore, these people would be more capable to live a joyful and healthy life. Additionally, these would prevent for low-income individuals to becoming sick, decreasing the amount of people being treated in hospitals and the early death rate.   

In conclusion, these proposed solutions would become beneficial for the whole nation, in order to stop the neoliberalism ideology. This is something that it should not be ignored, as these corporations would continue to take the possession of the entire wealth in America. Therefore, if these companies conquer the wealth of America, then poverty would continue to increase.  By increasing the poverty, many Americans would struggle economically. These individuals would continue to work in full-time jobs, and still looking sources of support such as requesting assistance from the government and borrowing money from banks. In addition, many of these individuals would get sick, but they would not attend their diseases with a physician due to the high-costs and non-accessible medical insurance, like the mom of my friend who I talked at the beginning of the story.

By improving the medical insurances for all individuals, America would create a social formation and a new America free of social hierarchy. The dominant ideology of neoliberalism would be distinguished in a sense of the medical pathway. As a result, individuals would become healthier since all people would be treated because all of them would receive accessible treatment at low or zero cost. This would convert America into a place where the absence of health would not exist anymore.

Works Cited

Birch, Kean. What Exactly is Neoliberalism. Accessed March 13, 2021.

Brissette, Christy. This is Your Body in Fast Food. Accessed March 14, 2021.

Elassar, Alaa. A Nurse Revealed the Last Words of his Coronavirus Patient: ‘Who’s Going to Pay for It?’. Accessed March 12, 2021.  

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Accessed March 13, 2021.

Monbiot, George. Neoliberalism – The Ideology at the Roof of all our Problems. Accessed March 13, 2021.

Politizane. (2012, November 20). Wealth Inequality in America [Video]. YouTube.

Suneson, Grant. What are the 25 Lowest Paying Jobs in the US? Women Usually Hold Them. Accessed March 12, 2021.

Whiteside, Logan; Naik, Richa. How This Single Mom Survives on $7.50 an Hour. Accessed March 12, 2021.