http://themilitant.com/2017/8114/811401.html
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Vol. 81/No. 14 April 10, 2017
(lead article, Socialist Workers Party statement)
Socialist Workers Party: ‘Universal health care!’
Join fight for government funded health care for all!
Sunnyside Seventh-day Adventist Church
Hundreds attend free health clinic, above, in Portland, Oregon, August
2016. Both Obamacare and Trump plan enrich insurance companies while
health care for working people deteriorates.
The following statement by Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party
candidate for New York mayor was released March 29.
Millions throughout the United States — unemployed or working, U.S.-born
and immigrants — are feeling the carnage of the slow-burning capitalist
economic crisis.
Millions who want to work can’t get jobs. Wages are stagnating or being
pushed down. Workers in uniform are being sent to fight in nonstop wars
to defend the interests of the propertied rulers. Infrastructure is
crumbling. The cost of health insurance is going up.
For workers and farmers, access to health care is literally a life and
death question. We need to join together to fight for government-funded,
cradle-to-grave medical care as a social right for all. Our unions
should be at the forefront of this fight .
The mixed bag of the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, is
health insurance not health care — designed first and foremost to boost
the profits of the insurance and drug monopolies. While millions were
able to get some inadequate and rationed coverage, which is better than
nothing, it has meant skyrocketing premiums, deductibles and co-pays for
shrinking care.
Trumpcare would have made this profit-driven system even worse, adding
another 24 million without health care by 2026. Like Obamacare, its
sponsors’ chief concern is the profits of the health “industry.”
The Trump administration plan, which is off the table for the moment,
includes a fundamental assault on Medicaid, a historic gain of the mass
Black rights fight that overturned Jim Crow segregation and won broader
social rights. The rulers’ efforts to deliver blows to Medicaid would
affect tens of millions of workers, children, the elderly, those with
disabilities, and their family and friends. It would open the door to
attacks on other entitlements won by past working-class struggles — from
Medicare to Social Security.
Working people place no price on life and limb. Health shouldn’t be
based on profitability. That’s why many working people are attracted to
the demand for a “single-payer” system, sometimes called “Medicare for
all.”
The working class, led by the union movement, should fight for
universal, lifetime health care for all, whatever name it’s given.
Through our labor, the working class produces all the wealth, more than
enough to provide health care and other social needs for all.
Revolutionary Cuba — where health care is a right, not a privilege —
shows what working people can accomplish when we wrest power from the
capitalist rulers and begin to build a society based on human
solidarity. Fighting for universal health care today will help open that
road to the socialist future here.
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