National Healthcare was proposed in the US with many promises and hopes that health care would be available to all and that "economies of scale" would make it more affordable and effective. However, the actual "Affordable Care Act" is anything but. This law ensures that the bosses, including the insurance industry, profit at the expense of the working class. Obamacare shifts payment for healthcare even more from corporations' profits to workers, increasing workers' taxes to pay for health care.
Workers with employer-sponsored group coverage will take even bigger hits than they have already, with increased co-payments and deductibles. The coming tax on these so-called "Cadillac" plans gives the bosses another excuse to limit coverage and raise workers' costs. Immigrants who do not have a green card are completely excluded from Obamacare.
The hype is that higher-paid workers with health insurance will pay more to cover the costs of lower-paid workers who have no health insurance, except immigrants without a green card. But lower-paid workers will get minimal coverage and the bosses' profits are not touched.
Cuts in MediCal and Medicare mean even worse health care. The bosses want a health care system to patch up workers and soldiers and get them back to work or the battlefield. Healthcare and profits don't mix!
Capitalism is not capable of or interested in providing the health care all workers need. In the name of "equality," the bosses are forcing all workers to have minimal, dangerous health care. The workers suffer cuts and the capitalists protect their profits. Any taxes the bosses pay will be for war, not workers' health care.
Many workers' struggles aim to stop increases in the cost of health benefits. But no matter how militant, these struggles will not stop the attacks on workers' health care.
Many who are seeing that the ACA is an attack are calling for "Single-Payer National Health Care" that eliminates the insurance companies' profits. They point to Canada as a model. While most workers in Canada get a similar level of care, it doesn't meet their needs. Many crucial tests and treatments are denied because they are expensive—with deadly results.
Whether single payer or private insurance, it's still capitalist health care. In El Salvador, if you don't get your medicine on the first day of the month, by the second day there often isn't any left. In every country with national health care, the rich buy better care.

Only communism can meet workers' health needs
We need preventive care on a mass scale and the best possible treatment when it's needed. Prevention can only come with eliminating the profit system with its constant deadly stress of capitalist exploitation. It means eliminating deadly pollution in food and in all production to guarantee a safe, healthy environment. Workers will reorganize all aspects of life to meet our needs, like eliminating freeways clogged with cars spewing pollutants. Collective physical activity will be a regular part of life. People will be healthier in a society where life is organized collectively based on communist relations, where we are all responsible for each other's well-being.
There won't be racist differences in workers' health care. Workers will mobilize to guarantee that no resource is spared to make every advance in science and technology available to everyone, and masses will learn how to use and evaluate them. Medicine and all science will be the property of the masses, not an elite few.
Teaching and learning about our bodies will be a mass undertaking for everyone from childhood until they die. That way we can make tremendous progress quickly in identifying, treating and curing diseases. The barefoot doctor movement in China trained tens of thousands of rural workers to be doctors. In communism, we will take that much further. Millions will learn to treat tens of millions more. Everyone who works with sick people will learn science, treat patients, and also give them physical care, ending the division between mental and manual labor. Patients will be cared for collectively by teams of health workers; their families will be included.
Masses of workers are becoming disillusioned with Obamacare and want decent healthcare for all. ICWP and Red Flag need to show our friends, families and co-workers that no capitalist reform, whether single-payer or reformed ACA, will solve the problem, but communist revolution will. We ask readers to write about capitalist and communist health care and to spread Red Flag now.