In the past month I have paid over $100 in co-pays for doctors' visits. If
world-wide pandemics are the new norm; then who can afford them? Sounds like a
man made case of genocide to me.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2020 10:18 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Fight for gov’t-funded, cradle-to-grave health care!
https://themilitant.com/2020/02/29/fight-for-govt-funded-cradle-to-grave-health-care/
Fight for gov’t-funded, cradle-to-grave health care!
article
Vol. 84/No. 9
March 9, 2020
The U.S. government, the most powerful imperialist power on the planet, like
every other capitalist power around the world, is far from prepared for the
spread of coronavirus. The virus is new, no one is immune, and it will take
time to develop an antidote.
The rulers in China and Iran tried to pretend things weren’t so bad and working
people are paying for it. The administration in Washington tells us they’ve got
everything in hand and complain the media is trying to make coronavirus “look
as bad as possible.”
The deadly impact of the virus will fall overwhelmingly on working people in
the U.S., as it does elsewhere, exacerbating the broader social, economic and
moral crisis of capitalism bearing down on us.
Millions of workers already confront the declining availability of health care.
Hospitals have been closing in rural areas and working-class neighborhoods,
where the owners decide they aren’t making enough profit. The system of health
insurance in the U.S. — whether it’s “Obamacare,” private health insurance or
the Medicare-for-all insurance schemes promoted by a wing of the Democrats — is
designed to guarantee a profit for hospital bosses and drug and insurance
companies, not to provide the health care working people need and deserve.
If we can’t afford to pay the rising costs they charge for premiums,
deductibles or copays, we have to go without something that should be a basic
human right.
The capitalist rulers consider the provision of health care to workers a
nonproductive expense. Hospital bosses are notorious for transporting homeless
people seeking care out of the city and dumping them. The capitalist rulers
seek to impose the responsibility for medical care onto individual workers and
our families. And if you don’t change your lifestyle — quit smoking, lose
weight, etc. — they want to make you pay more. You’re on your own.
Health care is social right
Health care is a social question. The working class and our unions need to
fight for government-funded cradle-to-grave health care for all. Our labor
produces all the wealth, more than enough to provide care for all, for a
lifetime. The problem is the employers expropriate that wealth for themselves.
So they don’t have to worry about the costs of getting treatment.
Health care as a social right can only be won by class struggle, including
breaking from all the capitalists’ parties, which insist that the health
insurance racket is untouchable. It will take massive struggles by workers and
our allies to take the hospitals and drug companies out of the hands of the
capitalists who run them for profit and organize to run them under workers
control in the interest of all. But it can be done.
Revolutionary Cuba is the one country in the world where health care is not a
commodity, where the surplus workers and farmers produce is used to provide
lifelong, preventative health care for every person. And where thousands of
volunteer medical workers provide much needed care throughout the world,
treating all they look after with dignity and respect. A vivid account is
provided in the recently published Red Zone: Cuba and the Battle Against Ebola
in West Africa.
The volunteers’ internationalism, author Enrique Ubieta writes, “is an
expression of their revolutionary humanism.”
As Che Guevara said, to be a revolutionary doctor you have to make a revolution.
Revolution transformed working people in Cuba This is only possible because
Cuban workers and farmers made a revolution and the government today is in
their hands. Making that revolution transformed working people. They simply
look at the problems they confront — from the U.S. rulers’ economic war against
them to the threat of coronavirus — as the responsibility of the whole people.
Whatever they face — a hurricane, a threat of disease, or anything else — they
prepare, mobilize the whole people and resources of their government, and take
it on.
The Socialist Workers Party campaign is grounded in the conviction that it is
possible to emulate that example. We can mobilize in our millions to overthrow
the dictatorship of the capitalist class here, take power into our own hands
and open the door to working people running society. Join us in campaigning for
Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett, the working-class alternative in 2020!
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“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
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