The social state is not saved with applause on the balconies

Each dose of the medicine that I inject for my chronic and incurable disease costs 1,246.48 euros.

In the first phase of treatment I need a vial every week (later, one every four), so this month I have injected chemicals worth 4,958.92 euros, of which I have not paid a cent.

The pharmacy of the public hospital where I am treated has dispensed them for free, adding a lot of kindness and a lot of good advice to the package.

Nobody informed me of the price, I have looked for it to remind myself in which country I live, not to lose sight of what is important and arm myself with reasons to defend a social State in times of demolition.

My life has improved a lot thanks to that drug.

Not only have the pains that embittered me subsided, but I have gone back to doing things that I was incapable of doing, like taking a long walk in the countryside or taking a few strokes in the sea.

I have regained control of a part of my body that I thought was lost, and it has all been thanks to a social consensus reached a few decades ago in Spain: the universalization of healthcare, a miracle that only happens in a small club of countries and the one sighed by hundreds of millions of ragged people in the five continents.

This consensus is threatened by a well-known right-wing populism, which rises its wave on the bitterness and legitimate resentment of the precarious, the unemployed and all the marginalized.

That is to say, of those who could not pay those 1,246.48 euros and who, in case of suffering from my illness, would have to resign themselves to pain and paralysis.

They are the ones who could not afford a cycle of chemo either when cancer visits them.

Some dream of an ethnic social state, a Spain for the Spanish, where the rest (the impure, the others, the foreigners, the liberals, the gays, whoever they are) rot in the sun of the stateless.

Le Pen is proposing something like this and Orbán is setting up something like this in Hungary.

The unfortunates believe that their misfortune will end when the politics of hate triumph and destroy yesterday's consensus.

This belief does not lie down with applause on the balconies or with cheesy invocations to the heroism of the toilets, but with price lists and budgets.

They are 1,246.48 euros per dose.

The exact price of well-being, the difference between a society that believes in progress and equality, and another where everyone saves himself as he can.

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber