On the Healthcare Crisis

On the Health Care Crisis

16 September 2009

1. A burning issue in class struggles in the United States is the crisis of health care, with an estimated seventy million people uninsured or underinsured, untold numbers pushed into bankruptcy by medical costs, and millions more bound to unsatisfactory jobs for fear of losing their costly and insufficient healthcare. With its grotesque class and race inequalities, denial of medical care to millions of poor and working people, and domination by outright criminal insurance and pharmaceutical monopolies, the “health care system” is a dramatic condemnation of American capitalism. We call for full socialized medicine, while recognizing that only through a socialist revolution in the U.S., and in the most powerful capitalist countries throughout the world, can full access to high-quality comprehensive healthcare be provided for all.

2. The current spectacle in Washington underscores the need for class-struggle militants to oppose the attacks of Obama’s health care plan on immigrants, unionized workers and Medicare benefits.  Clearly, the Democratic administration’s objective is not to see that health care is available to all, but to respond to major capitalist forces concerned about rising health-care costs at the same time as it seeks the favor of the insurance and pharmaceutical giants, who were major contributors to Obama’s election campaign and who stand to rake in billions from the extension of insurance under his plan.

3. The reactionary nature of the “debate” between the capitalist parties is illustrated by Obama pledging that “illegal” immigrants would not be covered, only to be interrupted by a frenzied Republican congressman screaming “You lie!” As bourgeois politicians compete over who is the most effective enemy of the oppressed, it has never been more urgent to fight for labor to break from all wings of the ruling class. Having worked overtime to spread illusions in Obama, the unions’ bureaucratic leadership preaches submission, passivity and collaboration in the face of escalating attacks on the working people. Key to defending the most basic rights and conquests of the workers and oppressed is the building of a class-struggle opposition in the unions, committed to the struggle for a workers party and workers government.

4. The demand for a “national single-payer health care system” has been put forward as a call for providing comprehensive healthcare, including to undocumented immigrants, within the present U.S. capitalist system. Although it leaves the providing of health care in private hands, if actually carried through,  such national health insurance would substantially benefit millions of working people, and would also represent a political defeat for the enormously wealthy private health insurance industry that profits from death and disease. Thus, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) gives critical support to this demand. While rejecting “popular-front” strategies which would tie this struggle to the Democratic Party, we will participate where appropriate in united-front actions and protests around this issue. At the same time, we recognize that were the single-payer plan to be implemented, the capitalist system would continue to place profit-seeking pressure on it such that, even on its own terms, the call for comprehensive coverage would be distorted. Access to healthcare is further impacted by systems of oppression that are manifested in the allocation of both power and resources within a given society: for example, housing, education, the criminal injustice system, and the limitations on democratic rights inherent in capitalism.

5. Although every other advanced capitalist country has such a system, given the sway of “free market” ideology in the U.S., even national health insurance, let alone socialized medicine, would likely not be won short of a mass upheaval threatening the bourgeoisie with the spectre of socialist revolution. Having long since become a brake on human progress, capitalism rips up past gains of the working class and proves incompatible even with lasting reforms. This fundamental aspect of capitalism in the “imperialist epoch” has been demonstrated with particular force since the 1970s – a striking example being the case of open admissions at CUNY, a significant gain which the rulers of New York City began to dismantle almost as soon as it was won. When the bourgeoisie is forced to “give” concessions with one hand, it seeks to take them away with the other. Thus, while supporting every real, even partial gain, we link this always and everywhere to the question of power, that is, for the working class to take power into its own hands in alliance with all the oppressed.