What Chief Inspector Wallander Knew

Although I read a lot, I’ve never been particularly enamored of the police/detective genre. Other than an odd Tony Hillerman or Sarah Paretsky when I’ve been sick or have been looking for diversion on a long flight, I’ve usually put my reading energies elsewhere. Recently though, I stumbled upon the Swedish author Henning Mankell and his acclaimed Kurt Wallander series. I just finished his book entitled The Man Who Smiled. In addition to a riveting plot and well-crafted atmospherics, it unexpectedly contained some moral philosophy from the lips of Inspector Wallander himself.

The story revolves around an extremely wealthy international business tycoon, Dr. Alfred Harderberg (the non-MD type, incidentally) with all the trappings of international Uberwealth: the biz jet, the beautiful-people staff, the architectural splendor, the sartorial perfection, the radiant smile and the intimidating aura and implicit threat of seemingly untouchable power. The problem was that behind the façade of all this wealth and power lay the frozen heart of an inhumane criminal who, as it turns out, was trafficking in human organs. And as he learned about this horrific underworld from a journalist he was interviewing, Wallander felt that he had taken

“a journey into an unimagined world where human beings

and body parts have been reduced to market commodities,

with no sign of any moral consideration.”

The parallels with the United States health care system are inescapable. And it is not an “unimagined world”. Beautiful, perfectly turned out business elites of for-profit insurance health insurance companies are paid tens of millions of dollars annually to issue ever more claims denials, rescisions, exclusions and otherwise come up with mechanisms to exclude the very people who need health care the most. And it is all while carrying out their “fudiciary responsibilites” to shareholders and the non-human legal entity otherwise known as the corporation. As individuals these elites are so insulated from the suffering their corporate power unleashes that they truly appear to have no moral compass whatsoever. Like Harderberg, they too have reduced human beings and human illness to a mere market commodity. This to me is the greatest injustice in an exclusively market-driven healthcare system that knowingly applies a false economic analogy, somehow equating human health with a refrigerator or an iPod. Most remarkable of all, in a political system populated by politicians who are so tainted with corrupt corporate money, it is all perfectly legal--- with little threat to the corporate benefactors of seeing any political effort by their representatives in Congress to regulate or change this fundamentally immoral system.

By 1834 the British Empire had banned the slave trade as morally unacceptable. They finally reached the conclusion that human life could never be bought or sold. In the United States the abolition of slavery was a more difficult process, only to finally be settled through devastating civil war. Why is it that moving in the direction of respecting fundamental human rights is always so contentious in the USA?

It is my fervent hope that my country will finally come to the same conclusion that chief inspector Wallander arrived at in the pages of a detective novel: that human beings ,their bodies and their health can never be reduced to mere commodities to be subjected to the whims of the markets and the elites who control them.