FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
To Contact ICWP, send an email to: icwp@anonymousspeech.com

“Can you write an article in Red Flag about how the Metropolitan Transit Authority won’t pay our health care coverage, if we retire before 55 after having worked 23 years?” asked an MTA bus operator.
“That’s what happens if you got hired after September 1991, and retire younger than 55 years.  You can have your pension but if you can’t afford to pay for health insurance you must keep working for MTA. They want you to work until you drop.”
“You’re right,” said our comrade. “Capitalism is anti-worker. It’s anti-human. Health care, profits and money don’t mix. We need a different system, communism, one that would value our lives and wellbeing above everything.”
In a communist society, masses of workers will guarantee that health care and all our basic needs will be met from birth to death, regardless of how much or how little we contribute to society.
No money will be involved in health care or anything else. No one will be denied treatment. Millions will learn how to treat and cure disease and care for people who are sick.

Health insurance or food or housing – you can’t have it all!
Another MTA operator told us, “Regardless of the age you retire, you have to pay something for your medical if you want MTA to pay some of it. Now, the negotiated medical cost is $1300 a month. That is how much you would pay if you retire before 55. If you decide to collect your pension, you will receive $2,100 per month.”
 “Not enough to pay for health insurance and survive,” said Red Flag.
“Yes, and you can’t get Medi-Cal because of your pension and savings. For the same reason Obamacare would be outrageously expensive. You would have to go without insurance until 65 when you can get Medicare.”
“So, they got you between a rock and a hard place.”
“Yes, they want you to work until you are 65, if you survive that long. If you retire younger than that age, your monthly insurance payment varies (see box). However, paying for insurance and surviving is practically impossible.” 
Not having health insurance could be a death sentence. Continuing to work at MTA is also death in slow motion. Operators end up suffering from many serious chronic diseases and living
7-10 years less than other retirees.

The Masses will be Healthier in Communism
A communist society will rapidly build a mass transportation system to rid the roads of most of the 253 million cars and trucks in the US and millions more around the world. This would eliminate the stress and all the illness it creates among bus drivers and millions of other drivers.
Stress comes from not having control of our life and work. The bosses use their power to hire and fire us to discipline and terrorize us. We can’t survive without a job. Thus, they have the power to decide who among us lives or dies, and how we live and die.
This and all their racist, sexist practices - to super-exploit women and black, latin, asian, arab, and many other immigrant workers – adds another layer of very deadly stress.
Destroying capitalism’s wage slavery with its racist sexist ideologies and practices will enable us in communism to be useful to society throughout our whole lives, always according to our commitment.
MTA workers’ contract will expire next year. The only way to deal with the bosses who want to work us into the grave is to mobilize to destroy their racist sexist system of exploitation with a communist revolution. We need to organize communist political strikes against MTA’s and capitalism’s inhumanity. Such strikes can show millions the possibility of revolution and a communist world.
We invite MTA workers to march on May Day under ICWP’s red banners of communism. Join ICWP and help make communism a reality.

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