Health Care or Line the Pockets of the Rich?

I have been a public sector worker- a Registered Nurse, my entire working life. Long before I was politically active my experience with health care as a worker and as a user has been in a publicly funded, universally accessible and publicly administered system in Canada. I knew nothing else and this greatly affected my consciousness. While public health care in Canada has never been as extensive as the NHS in the UK it has always been in the main a public single payer system and basic social entitlement. If you need to see your physician or go to the hospital all you need to receive comprehensive quality health care is to hand over your health card. Privatization and delisting of services has for approximately 2 decades undermined public health care in Canada but it generally remains intact –for now. If you need blood work or an x-ray, a CT scan, consultations with dieticians etc., whatever the case, the same applied. Digging into your wallet to pay for health care was and still is to a large degree considered something alien to Canadians.

As a new graduate I worked on a medical unit in an inner city hospital in Toronto. I had the privilege, the obligation and right to provide exactly the same excellent nursing care to every patient. It did not matter if they were poor, on social assistance or wealthy ,every patient received the same intensive and comprehensive care. I also remember the freedom that we had as nurses to speak up if ever there was a hint that anyone was entitled to more attention or care. The unit I worked had 4 bed rooms, private rooms and semi-private rooms. The only exception to entitlement at the time was supplemental insurance that paid for semi-private and private rooms. Even then if an acutely ill patient required a private room and had no such insurance –he still was moved into a private room near the nursing station –based on his medical needs not on whether or not he/she had supplemental insurance.

Occasionally a nursing supervisor would come to the unit and hint that there was a very important patient in the private room at the end of the hall and perhaps we should be aware of this , maybe answer his bell very quickly, make sure his bedside water jug was refilled a little more often- little things like that. I also remember having the freedom to say to my supervisor that EVERY patient on my shift received the same quality care and that I was offended that she would hint at anything different –and I could get away with this. She could not discipline me for being “cheeky” or “insubordinate “because she had no grounds for her requests and she knew it and in fact I could report HER if she persisted.

This anecdotal account is a round about way of getting at the issue of workers and the taxes they pay. When I began my career as a nurse I was poorly paid. Nurses in Ontario were just beginning to unionize. In this same hospital I organized a union local. Imagine this-when the union drive was over and we won by a small margin I received a letter from the Director of Nursing at the time congratulating me on our organizing success and apologizing for not being supportive during the drive, explaining her position as a administrator. Hard to imagine -but those were the times.

An offshoot of this was that as a public sector worker I never minded paying my taxes. I never saw taxes as a burden because everyday as a worker and as a recipient of health care I could see where my taxes were going directly and indirectly. The money I paid in taxes was coming directly back into my pocket as a user of health care and as a worker. I was the recipient of a social wage.

Have no illusions - Canada has never been a socialist country, not even a social democracy. Far from it -it has always been a bourgeois state run by the ruling elite for the capitalist class. We did however have a party, supported by the working class that to a significant degree influenced and ameliorated the ravaging of the ruling elite, that to some extent fought for and represented the interests of working people as a class. Never as powerful as the Labour Party in Britain or various social democratic parties in Europe, it nevertheless it existed and its political influence forced concessions from the capitalist class and its political representatives.

As a young worker I was not political in any real sense. I had little to no knowledge of Canada’s political history, of the various forces that affected my life as a worker. But I had a sense of entitlement as a “citizen “ and a sense of responsibility as a nurse to defend my patients right to excellent publicly funded health care. Yes I paid taxes but I never gave a thought to that because I could see my tax dollars benefit me and all working people. I understood that richer people than me also benefited but the principle of universality was burnt into my brain as a principle worth defending. Even I knew as politically naive as I was that if this principle was undermined we would open the floodgates to all sorts of evils.

It has always been very difficult for Canadian workers to understand resistance in the US to public health care. Despite recent polls that show that the majority of working people in the US are in favour and despite the millions of pages of research literature that show without a doubt that a single payer public health care is more efficient and much less costly to administer –still the profit addicted owners and investors in for profit health care and their political reps prevail. So now 40 years later all workers are faced with austerity agendas that threaten not only their wages and benefits but also all our public services to a degree never seen before.

Attacks on workers and attacks on our public services always go hand in hand. What is literally mind boggling is that workers world wide have witnessed our hard earned money, on which we pay taxes, literally being poured without shame into the pockets of the profit addicted wealthy and their institutions – we are handing over the mostly meager fruits of our labour to rescue a system that at its best, when it “appeared” to be working, refused hundreds of millions of working people the right to health care in the US. A system that has stolen homes from millions of working people and forced thousands of working and poor people onto the streets, into tents and shelters. A rotten to the core system that, even after the worst economic crisis continues in the same way, and proves without a doubt that it works only for the wealthy few, viciously attacks workers . This same corrupt few accuse public sector workers of having fat salaries, benefits and pensions and benefits, pits poorly paid non unionized workers against the unionized. A system that attacks young workers in the manufacturing sector with 2 tier wage structures as it eagerly tries to rob older workers of their meager pensions and social security.

Trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of lives wasted on a war waged on lies over resources and geopolitical influence. The newspapers tell us that oil prices are skyrocketing again. Meanwhile public transit , a more energy efficient way to transport millions of working people to work are crumbling as state and municipal governments succumb to deficit reducing budgets.

Meanwhile we look back on the millions and millions of dollars the trade union leadership poured into the Obama campaign. Millions upon millions of dollars that could have been spent on education and door to door campaigns involving union members, at the same time mobilizing trade unionists and working people in general armed with economic and political facts to fight for our jobs , our homes , for single payer health care for affordable quality education and child care.

So when we talk about taxes –when we look around us –what is it we really want –to pour our hard earned money into the pockets of the war mongering rich or do we want jobs and pensions for all working people. Do we want a 30 hr work week at same wages which will provide more jobs? Do we want the right to health care and education and a decent retirement.? We have the fight of our lives before us. But what choice do we rally have –for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren.