Health Care “Reform” Law: Bonanza for Wall Street, an Attack on Working People

Health Care “Reform” Law: Bonanza for
Wall Street, an Attack on Working People

• President Obama and the Congressional leaders say they’ve just passed a “historic” health care reform. It’s not.
• It’s not historic, it’s not a reform, and it’s not even a step in the right direction. The health care “reform” is an attack on working families and a gift to the insurance companies, the drug companies and the private hospital corporations. It’s going to hurt our health care coverage in the UFT. It’s a setback in the struggle for universal health care coverage.
• If people aren’t aware of that, they haven’t been reading the fine print. Just like many people didn’t pay attention when Obama said he had the same education program as John McCain, and when he said he wasn’t going to pull all the troops out of Iraq and he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
• First, it won’t mean anything like universal health coverage. Even by the most optimistic estimates 23 million people will remain uninsured, many of them immigrant workers in dangerous and low-paid jobs. Not only are undocumented immigrants not covered, the care they now receive in emergency rooms will be cut back because the government is slashing $40 billion out of funds to “disproportionate share hospitals” to cover the uninsured.
• Probably many more will remain uninsured. Why? Because the insurance plans they will be required to buy are so expensive and provide such lousy coverage. In Massachusetts the basic plan costs $2,800 for an individual and has a $4,000 deductible, so people will pay almost $7,000 before they see a dime of benefits. As a result many people, especially younger people, may figure they’re better off paying a fine.
• Second, this is the biggest government attack on women’s right to abortion since Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde Amendment in 1976. Yet “pro-Choice” Democrats in Congress knuckled under and women’s organizations like NOW and NARAL didn’t say boo. The ban on abortion will now apply to community health centers, and abortion coverage will be dropped from all insurance plans.
• Third, this “reform” is a giant subsidy to the insurance companies, the drug companies and the for-profit hospitals. The insurance companies are supposed to pay $70 billion in taxes, but in return they are going to get subsidies of $450 billion and hundreds of billions more in new customers who are going to be forced to buy their defective products.
• The right wing pretends that this is a government takeover of medical care. Wrong. It’s the consolidation of corporate control of medicine. Rather than socialized medicine, it’s going more towards the corporate state, just like all the corporate “education reform.”
• Fourth, a main way this “reform” is going to be paid for is by taxing our insurance plans. The excise tax on so-called “Cadillac health plans” is the biggest source of additional funds to pay for the subsidies. Yet individual high cost health insurance plans like Wall Street execs have are exempt from this tax, it’s the union plans, they’re going after.
• The Senate bill originally said the tax would bring in $140 billion by 2019. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO did some last minute horse-trading and reduced that to “only” $32 billion. He must be taking lessons from Weingarten: hand over two-thirds of the givebacks the bosses are demanding, then claim “victory” because you didn’t give away the whole store.
• In any case, this is an illusion. The AFL-CIO tops just postponed the tax, so that it starts in 2018 instead of 2013. It’s still going to be a whopping tax and the main outside source of funding, and it will be taking an increasing bite out of our health plans as medical inflation increases.
• Employers won’t agree to a 40 percent increase in cost, instead they’ll cut benefits to come in under the ceiling. Since dental and vision care were exempted, it will probably be cut from long-term hospitalization and major surgery. People don’t go into the hospital for a month or have a major operation frivolously. So now we will have to pay out of pocket or buying super-expensive additional private insurance.
• What it comes down to is they are taking tens of billions of dollars from the pockets of working families and giving them to the capitalists of the medical industry. That’s the bottom line of this health insurance “reform.”
• On top of that they plan to cut “hundreds of billions of dollars” out of Medicare payments.
• And they’re not stopping there. Next up is “reform” of the Social Security system. The New York Times reported on March 23 that the administration plans to raise the retirement age and reduce benefits for Social Security, which is “the other big entitlement benefits program and one that Mr. Obama has suggested in the past that he is willing to tackle.”
• Many younger teachers don’t grasp the role of a union because they’ve never seen a real union struggle. Many tend to see the UFT as an agency for providing health insurance. Why? Because that’s how the union leadership acts. When Trumka goes to the White House to negotiate to postpone the tax, he’s just following the insurance company execs’ playbook.
• A fighting union leadership would insist on national health insurance as a first step. And it would not only refuse to support Obama and the Democrats’ corporate health care “reform,” it would bring tens of thousands of union members out into the streets to oppose it. Instead, the union leaders leave opposition to the ultra-rightist Tea Party racists.
• What we need is exactly what the right wing and the corporate interests and the Tea Partyers fear – real socialized medicine, so that universal health care is a right, not a commodity. And to do that, it’s necessary to break with the Democrats and build a class struggle workers party that fights for a society in which the working people rule, not the corporations.
• So when you find your health insurance premiums going up and your coverage cut, when your Medicare benefits and Social Security payments are slashed, don’t be shocked. The UFT bureaucracy’s Unity caucus and the reformist ICE-TJC opposition don’t warn about this because neither is prepared to go up against the Democrats. They are blocking a real fight against corporate takeover of the schools and health care.
• Whether it’s education “reform” or health care “reform,” it’s all an attack on working people. And it’s all coming straight from the top, from the White House and Wall Street. Until labor is ready and willing to fight those forces, it will just go from defeat to defeat, losing membership and sacrificing union gains piecemeal until the unions themselves are destroyed (or become an empty shell), as has happened with many already.
• That’s one more reason why we need to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions. 

See the Class Struggle Education Workers statement, "On the Health Care Crisis" (September 16, 2009) for further discussion.

Obama Supports Mass Firing of R.I. Teachers

Obama Supports Mass Firing of R.I. Teachers

President Obama made a hair-raising teacher-bashing speech March 1 when he supported the mass firing of all 93 teachers and staff at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, and said he’d like it to happen around the country. The Rhode Island teachers were fired by the trustees who said the school was failing, and blamed the teachers. 

If teachers are being scapegoated for the failures of a system, no educator’s job is safe.

Central Falls, Rhode Island is the poorest, run-down and most densely populated city (1.3 square miles) in the state, with the highest percentage of immigrants. It’s run by an Anglo mafia who stay in office because many of the residents can’t vote.

It’s an old factory town, whose factories have closed down. Now it’s a one industry town – a for-profit prison for immigrants lured by the same city fathers who are firing all the teachers. The prison gained notoriety in 2008 when the death of an inmate threw a harsh light on terrible conditions in the facility.

In his remarks, Obama said school districts could get federal grant money to turn around schools but they’d have to agree to 1) fire the principal and at least half the staff, or 2) turn the school into a charter or 3) shut it down altogether.

He spoke before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that voice of American capitalism. On the platform with him was Colin Powell, who carried out Desert Slaughter for Bush I in 1991 and who told the world for Bush II in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Now Powell and his wife have an education foundation and we are supposed to believe his recommendations are in the interest of kids.

In the aftermath of Obama’s “fire ’em all” speech, Newsweek (March 15) ran a cover story, “The Key to Saving American Education,” in which the cover showed a blackboard filled with the sentence: “We must fire bad teachers.”

Many people are in denial: they think the president is the victim of bad advisors. But you can’t blame this one on Arne Duncan.  This has been Obama’s program since before he was elected. Charter schools, privatization, merit pay – the whole nine yards. The program of corporatization of public education is shared by both the Democrats and the Republicans. (Ditto for bailing out Wall Street banks and making war on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and others.)

So now, Randi Weingarten, as head of the AFT, finally criticized Obama for his speech. A little late. In reality, she’s an enabler for corporate school “reform.”

How can anybody still believe that the Democrats are “friends of labor”?

In the last delegate assembly, there was a brief back-and-forth (to the extent that Unity allows) on the question of our union endorsing a Democratic Party politician. In this case it was just a state office post in Albany, that bastion of incorruptible upstanding political leadership. But it’s not a question of any one individual. We in Class Struggle Education Workers say that you can’t defeat the corporate school “reform” agenda without addressing the whole system of racism and class oppression.

The UFT Should Demand Debbie Almontaser Get Her Job Back

The UFT Should Demand Debbie Almontaser Get Her Job Back

Debbie Almontaser at October 2007 City Hall rally  to demand her job back.

(Photo: Arnie Tritt for the New York Times)

On March 11, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in favor of Debbie Almontaser over her outrageous ouster by the NYC Department of Education. Almontaser was the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran academy, the city’s only Arabic-English bilingual public school, who was run out in a xenophobic frenzy stoked by sensationalist media and reactionary politics in 2007.  The EEOC ruled that, by forcing her resignation and then refusing to rehire her, the Department was “guilty of bias and discrimination on account of race, religion and national origin.” So it’s official – the DOE acted in a racist, bigoted and chauvinist manner.

Debbie is a longtime educator and a Muslim, who courageously advocated for immigrant rights amid the anti-Arab hysteria in the wake of  9/11.  Some of us first got to know Debbie when we participated in the weekly protests to free the detainees at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention center after the racist roundups of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men at that time.

In 2007, Debbie was forced out as principal after a concerted Zionist conspiracy to slander her as a “jihadist” and “9/11 denier.” The witchhunt was spear-headed by CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld who set up a “Stop the Madrassa Coalition” and whipped up a trash campaign in the New York Post. Major Zionist politicians got involved like Dov Hikind in Brooklyn, where the school was located.

The UFT should have denounced the witchhunt. Instead, Randi Weingarten piled on. She wrote to the Post saying she “agreed wholeheardly” with their disgusting editorial. She also said, “maybe [Almontaser] should not be a principal” because she did not condemn the word “intifada” on T-shirts that had been found in an office where she shared office space with another community group. 

This was an atrocity. Many teachers have been defending Debbie Almontaser since the outset. Courageously, Rabbi Michael Paley at United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York called the campaign against her a “high-tech lynching.”

It is rare these days for the EEOC to rule in favor of the victim (usually they’re more likely to join in the fray). But this case is so blatantly discriminatory, that the EEOC has ruled in her favor.

However, the EEOC has no power.  Bloomberg/Klein have dug in their heels and say they will fight this to the end in the courts, with a little help from their Zionist teacher-bashing friends at the New York Post.

The UFT stand up and demand that Debbie Almontaser be rehired.