New York City’s Health and Hospital Corp. the agency that runs the public hospital system announces that it will be slashing its workforce by 10% over the next two years. The state government has already cut $240 million in annual Medicaid payments to the city’s public hospital system during the last three years according to the Wall Street Journal. * There’s more to come as Democratic governor, David Patterson, is planning to cut more than $1 billion in health care subsidies statewide in the upcoming fiscal year which begins July 1st.
The cuts will eliminate 4000 jobs over the next eighteen months or so. Employee pensions are also threatened. “ No hospital system in the country is exempt from the crushing economics facing the health care industry” says New York City’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg. What is exempt is the stolen wealth social parasites like him accumulate through speculation and other useless activity. It is incredible that the term “class warfare” can be thrown around by the highly censored US mass media any time we raise the issue of defending social services or when we blame the rich (the real culprits) for the crisis in society, yet what we have in reality is a ferocious class war against workers and the middle class being waged by Bloomberg and his class colleagues.
This violence being waged against some of the more vulnerable of us by the capitalist class and their state is intensifying as government aid drops to public hospital systems just as the need for it, also caused by Bloomberg and his pals, increases. Health care, education, all public services have to be savaged in order to pay for the bail outs and the millions of dollars in interest that will be have to be paid by the US taxpayer to money lenders to cover the costs of borrowing over the next decades. The public heath system in the US is bad enough as it is and it is being driven even further in to crisis.
“The problem is a combination of growing demand for health care and under insured” says Larry Gage, president of the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health systems. But this is not the problem it is a by- product of the problem----a failed social system. The problem is that the health industry in the US is actually a sickness industry, it profits from sickness and sickness is what drives it. In 2002, profits for pharmaceutical companies accounted for 55% of all Fortune 500 companies profits. CEO William Mcguire of United Health Group was compensated (I use the term “compensated” as he didn’t earn it) $124 million in 2004. This money could have paid 833 doctors at “typical” 2007 salaries or could run one reasonable sized community hospital for a year. This is made all the easier by their friends in Washington. Between 1998 and 2005, the pharmaceutical industry spent $675 million in federal lobbying (bribing).
Meanwhile, what is already one of the most backward health systems in the industrial world will kill yet more people. The Bloomberg’s, Gates’ Buffett’s and other top dogs of the capitalist class of this world are murderers. Thousands upon thousands of people die each year in the US and throughout the world due to inadequate health care that is not provided by the system they champion and propagate. The health system alone is a human catastrophe of immense proportions, not to mention Katrina, an almost forgotten catastrophe, a product of the free market not of the natural world. Then there are the predatory wars of course---the list is a long one.
Unfortunately, the response from the heads of organized Labor to these announcements are the usual pathetic compromises. “We are aware of the potential for cutbacks in services that could affect our members and we are working closely with our state and city legislators to avoid these devastating cuts.” This is the measured response from Lillian Roberts executive director of AFSCME District Council 37 in NYC; not much anger there. AFSCME DC 37 has over 125,000 workers in it and along with the other Unions, notably the Teamsters and the Teachers Unions, could paralyze this center of world finance. They should be working "against" the legislators, not with them.
What has been referred to as the “sickness industrial complex” on this blog will only be able to serve people, only be able to become a true health service, when it is taken out of the hands of the private sector; when its day to day operation is managed by the doctors, nurses, patients and the communities it serves as opposed to a few thousand speculators. This in turn cannot be successful until capital, which along with Labor, is the lifeblood of production, is also taken in to public ownership and its allocation and its use is determined collectively by those who create it and the majority of society that needs it. The financial industry, banks, finance houses etc. (not individuals savings accounts) must be taken in to public ownership, and the surplus value our Labor creates and the allocation of it, must be determined in a planned and rational way through a democratic socialist economic/political alternative to this dictatorship of capital that we live in.
* Hospitals Under the Knife WSJ, 3-26-10
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