While sitting in a comrade's back yard in California this week , we were commenting on what a lovely little spot in the world his small bungalow and backyard was.Nothing grand but beautiful. It took years of hard labour on the part of 2 public sector workers to have this little piece of security and home. As a single parent I have never been able living in Toronto to own a home. This does not bother me too much because I am fortunate enough to live in rent geared to income housing.
The result of long hard struggles on the part of the working class, now fast disappearing. I mentioned that I have no hard assets really, when he pointed out to me that indeed I do have an asset as do all Canadians and that is public health care. We talked a bit about this fact and it made me think even more clearly about how concrete an asset like free public healthcare really is.
Just one serious illness , not covered or only partially covered by private health care plan in the US , and a worker can kiss their house goodbye.
Tragically over 50 percent of bankruptcies in the US are partially a result of health care debt. Over 1.5 million foreclosures are a result of medical debt.
And retiring couples need a savings of over 250,000 dollars in order to cover their most basic health care costs. These figures are probably way higher in reality.
It is always an eye opener when I visit the US to hear young people talk about health care. I spoke with a young woman , only 18 years old, struggling to make enough money working long hours in a sandwich shop to go to college. She asked me what our conference was all about. I told her we were socialists and we were fighting for a better world and different kind of system where working people could have free education and free health care and survive and live in a world where the fruits of all our hard work would come back to us and all hard working people would decide where money was spent and not just a few rich people. her response was "Cool-free health care would be so good."
She then told me how she had a bad fall, hurt her shoulder and had to visit the doctor and how the entire process cost her 800 dollars out of pocket, A MONTHS SALARY!!! for her. She then told me how hard it was for her to save enough money to go back to school. When I told her that if that had happened to me it would not have cost me anything at all- she was astounded. We then talked about how working people should have free education as well and how wonderful that would be. It struck me once again what a brutally hard and cruel system capitalism is - to deprive the young of their most basic needs and put so many obstacles in their path.
It will be a hard struggle to keep public health care in Canada and an even harder struggle on the part of working people to win what should be our most obvious asset, assets that working people have always earned through our labour and that we will own.The capitalist class knows this, knows that they cannot hold the youth and workers of all ages hostage to their whip , if we own our own education system and our own health care and our own security as we grow older. They despise the freedom workers would have , the leisure and the security to enrich our lives and grow and thrive as we are entitled to.
We cannot afford to fail!
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