Sinclair’s “Jungle” & ACA Challenges

Diego Rivera, from "Motor City Mural"

Diego Rivera, from “Motor City Mural”

In his Saturday New York Times column, Joe Nocera gives an interesting reason why China will not be a real economic rival to the United States anytime soon.  It lacks an Upton Sinclair writing novels like The Jungle.

Nocera begins by talking about the distrust among Chinese mothers of baby formula produced by their own country. That’s because, in 2008, “six babies died and some 300,000 became ill after their mothers fed them baby milk products that were tainted with the chemical melamine.” According to Nocera, baby formula is only the tip of the iceberg. Because of lax regulations, China is producing a whole host of defective products, thereby forfeiting the trust of its people. This in turn is undermining its attempt to develop an healthy internal market to go along with its strong export market, Here’s where Sinclair’s novel comes in:

In the United States, of course, it has become religion among conservatives to denounce regulation, saying it stifles business and hinders economic growth. But consider: At the turn of the last century, America was as riddled with scam artists as China is today. Snake oil salesmen — literally — abounded. Food safety was a huge issue. In 1906, however, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his exposé-novel about the meatpacking industry. That book, pointed out Stanley Lubman, a longtime expert in Chinese law, in a recent blog post in The Wall Street Journal, is what propelled Theodore Roosevelt to propose the Food and Drug Administration. Which, in turn, reformed meat-processing — among many other things — and gave consumers confidence in the food they ate and the products they bought.

It’s interesting that Nocera mentions The Jungle because I’ve been thinking recently of another lesson found in Updike’s classic. This one applies to the Affordable Health Care Act.

In a last ditch effort to sabotage Obamacare, apparently a number of red states have launched campaigns to persuade young people not to sign up for the new health insurance exchanges. As a recent New York Times editorial noted,

To their shame and discredit, Republicans are trying to block efforts to inform people about the law and are using scare tactics to keep them from enrolling…When Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, revealed that she was talking with the National Football League and other athletic organizations about ways to inform their fans about insurance on the exchanges, the two highest-ranking Republican senators wrote a threatening letter that caused the league to back off.

Enlisting athletes to get the word out, as Massachusetts did when it was selling Romneycare, can be effective at enrolling young people in the exchanges. The wide participation of the young is necessary to offset the cost of people who are sick. If only the old and sick were to sign up, then insurance premiums would skyrocket and the Affordable Care Act would not be affordable.

Will young people, focusing only on their present health, refuse to sign up?  There is a troubling sign in The Jungle. One could imagine that the young Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis, who is applying for a job in the Chicago stockyards, might not jump readily at health insurance if it stretched his budget. I’ve quoted the following passage in a previous post on Obamacare, but it’s worth citing again:

Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward—stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. “That is well enough for men like you,” he would say, “silpnas, puny fellows—but my back is broad.”

Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company’s “Central Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month—yes, many months—and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say, “but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms”—and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles—”that with these arms people will ever let me starve?” 

You can probably predict what happens even if you haven’t read the novel: Jurgis goes on to become one of those broken down men. He sprains his ankle and loses valuable pay and then his job. To add to his misery, he also loses his house—he learns that  has been tricked on his mortgage—and then, because he cannot afford a doctor, his wife dies in childbirth. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong.

If our young people don’t face quite such a series of disasters, it’s because, over the decades since the publication of Sinclair’s book, Congress has passed a whole host of measures protecting the Jurgises amongst us.These include work place safety regulations, workmen’s compensation laws, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and the food stamp program. With the new Consumer Protection Agency, which until recently the GOP has been trying to block, Jurgis might have gotten help against mortgage scam artists. And because of legislation passed in the 1980’s, a hospital emergency room would be forced to accept his wife in labor.

Despite all the GOP talk about tyranny and freedom, forcing a contemporary Jurgis to buy health insurance or be fined hardly seems an imposition given what society is offering in return. Of course, all it takes is one misstep while walking, one moment of inattention while driving a car, to make that insurance worth it. And to save the rest of us from paying Jurgis’s emergency room bills.

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