FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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CALIFORNIA, October 25 –“Kaiser really treats the nurses badly,” said a Kaiser physician. “Now they’re going after social workers.” She is also angry about increasingly being forced to practice a lower quality of medical care. That’s the reality of capitalist health care.
Conflict continues between the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), whose members include dietary workers, social workers, nurses, audiologists and others, and Kaiser Permanente, California’s largest Health Maintenance Organization (HMO). A November strike is possible. Will workers strike only to hold on to some benefits?
Kaiser reported $1.1 billion net income for 2014’s first quarter, up from $765 million for the same period in 2013. Yet Kaiser aims to cut workers’ benefits and continue to under-staff hospitals and clinics.
NUHW has limited its struggle to working within the bosses’ laws/system, like election politics and personal attacks on Kaiser board members. However, the conflict between management and workers is systemic. The solution is destroying the capitalist profit system, which fails us all, and creating a system designed and run by workers: communism.
Under communism, money will no longer exist. Therefore, products (including health care) will no longer need to be exchanged for dollars, euros, or yen. We will be able to meet everybody’s physical and psycho-social needs by working cooperatively for the common good. We’ll help each other stay healthier and provide the best care possible when someone’s sick or injured.
As Kaiser workers think about a possible strike, we invite them to consider a political strike against capitalism and for communism.

All Capitalist Health-Care Models Are Bad
The Kaiser Permanente model requires pre-paid benefits. It spends that money to provide services later. Fewer services rendered, and more work squeezed out of employees, means more money in KP’s pocket. So Kaiser patients with serious psychiatric needs go untreated or wait more than seven weeks for an appointment. 
An illustration: KP averages 600 hospital days/year in a post-acute care facility per 1,000 clients. By comparison, Medicare averages about 2,000 hospital days/year in a post-acute care facility per 1,000 clients.
But under the Medicare fee-for-service model, providers and hospitals make more profit when patients overeat, smoke, misuse medicine and end up with diabetes, heart conditions or other ailments. These require hospital beds, enrollments in high-cost nursing facilities and other expensive interventions.
Both models are horrible.
But a third bad model is NUHW’s single-payer universal health care option. This might resolve some issues, but it creates others. With the federal government as single-payer, the pressure to cut services would come from a growing war budget.

The Capitalist Profit System Is the Problem
The US bosses seem concerned with our health care because they need a healthy workforce in their factories and in their military for inevitable wars to come. But they need to keep costs down so they find ways to make workers and patients pay.
The US spends twice as much per person on health care as other rich countries. Yet US life expectancy and infant mortality are among the worst. If Healthcare workers at Kaiser and worldwide put their energy into organizing to smash capitalism rather than for dead-end temporary reforms, we could win a true victory for the world’s working class!
Capitalists constantly spread anti-communist propaganda. They use racism, sexism, and patriotism to divide us, trying to ensure the survival of their system. But their system forces them to attack workers by cutting benefits, using us as cannon-fodder in war, and incarcerating the poor and unemployed, especially minorities. So it helps create its own gravediggers.
Help fight for a world where workers will share ALL that we produce! Fight for a world where no one will have excess while others starve! Help spread the truth about capitalism and the vision of a better tomorrow. Read and distribute Red Flag. Join the International Communist Workers’ Party.

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