Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane. Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Nothing reveals the mounting race and class inequalities under capitalism like the growing healthcare-for-profit disaster. The statistics are startling: According to the August 2006 Census report, there are 46.6 million Americans without health insurance; half of all personal bankruptcies are caused by mounting healthcare bills; the lack of insurance is the 7th leading cause of death in the U.S; and the Rand Corporation found that 60% of the care delivered in the U.S. is substandard.
The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation, yet ranks 37th in the world in providing quality healthcare. Big businesss answer to the crisis is to close down hospitals and ration services for the poor and workers in the name of market efficiency. In New York, a bipartisan commission appointed by outgoing Governor Pataki recommended the closure of 16 facilities, including six hospital and nursing homes, and the axing of as many as 6,400 healthcare jobs.
The question of healthcare has become a key issue in virtually all recent union contract negotiations, from the hotel workers to the recent Goodyear strike, as big business attempts to take back benefits won by the labor movement.
Will the Democrats Deliver Healthcare Reform?
Many working people will look to the newly-elected Democratic majority in Congress to reverse the policies of the Bush administration on crucial social and political questions and to do something about healthcare reform. At the end of 2006, Democratic congressman John Conyers introduced HR 676 (National Health Insurance Act, or the expanded and improved Medicare For All Act).
Conyers is still receiving scant support from fellow Democrats, many of whom are in the pocket of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The Democratic Party is incapable and unwilling to take on the healthcare industry, as they proved during the Clinton administration in 1993-94 when they had control of Congress as well as the presidency.
The only way a national healthcare system can become a reality is by organizing a massive campaign to defeat healthcare cuts and concessions in benefits, and linking that struggle to the need to take profit out of healthcare. The trade union movement can play a leading role in such a campaign. The unions still have millions of members and the resources to organize teach-ins and demonstrations in all major cities. In this way, the labor movement can show that it will fight to defend the interests of all workers, immigrants, the unemployed, pensioners, students, etc.
Such a movement can start by educating the public at large about the realities of healthcare in the U.S., the obscene profits of the pharmaceutical corporations, hospital chains, and the insurance companies, and link this to the need to establish democratic control over healthcare by taking the profit out of sickness!
A movement that demands a national healthcare system will have to be linked to the demand to tax big business and the rich and explain the case for public ownership and democratic control of the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance industry.
The Democrats are too timid and corporate-controlled to launch such a struggle that would truly benefit working people. Correctly, they would fear that gaining such reforms in healthcare would only open the door for the demand to get living wages, decent pensions, or to take the profit out of the oil companies and other corporate criminals.
The Democrats time and again have shown themselves to be a responsible partner in administrating in the interests of big business and delivering next to nothing for workers. Fighting to establish a free national healthcare system will require that workers build an independent political alternative to end the corporate control over healthcare.