Where are the Poor People? Dumped on the Side of the Road

I heard a story about hospitals dumping poor patients on NPR a while back. But this morning I read this article in the NY Times entitled: "‘Dumping’ of Homeless by Hospitals Stirs Debate."

The opening paragraph begins with these words:

For a year, reports have surfaced that hospitals here have left homeless patients on downtown streets, including a paraplegic man wearing a hospital gown and colostomy bag who witnesses say pulled himself through the streets with a plastic bag of his belongings held in his teeth....

Advocates for the homeless said it was common in many cities for homeless people still requiring medical treatment to end up on the street or at the doors of shelters ill prepared for their medical needs.

Much attention in this article is focused on the lack of proper laws to protect the poor and homeless people being dumped on the side of the road. But I want to suggest that the law or lack of law is only part of larger way of organizing our social and political relationships.

Michel Foucault proposed the concept of "biopolitics" and I think that it aptly helps explain this dumping process. Biopolitics is a term that refers (generally speaking) to the modern governing of life. That is, when bare life becomes the politicized object of governmental practice and the health of the people as a whole is sustained through the act of excluding the unhealthy and impure. It is a mode of governing that emerged primarily during the 18th and 19th centuries and continues to help organize much of our everyday lives.

These people being dumped on the side of the street are the objects of exclusion. In the name of efficiency and economical decisions, the hallmarks of neoliberal economics, they are pushed literally out of the hospital and ambulance and excluded from the possibility of care. Care is for those consumers that fit in to the system, for those that can pay their own way and do not become a drag on the whole population. Health and wealth go hand in hand in the context of a neoliberal economic arrangement. Conversely, to be "homeless" and "poor" is in some sense to be the figurative stranger, the outsider on the inside of a consumer-centered polity.

During the NPR story, a women was apparently dumped within eye-shot of a theatre. Imagine the onlookers watching the process. I'm sure some felt guilt pangs and maybe others actually did something about it. But in the end, most probably went into the theatre and watched their show. They too participated in the exclusion. They too joined in complicity with the hospital. We all are complicit in some way. Walking with the flows of crowds, I pass by homeless people everyday. In some sense, I think, we all politicize bare life and we all participate in its exclusion and banishment.