Only Communism Can Guarantee Workers’ Health

USA, Jan. 10 –ObamaCare (the Affordable Care Act) went into effect in October 2013.  Three years later, over 33 million people have gotten health insurance through it.  But over 30 million still don’t have any, including 12 million undocumented workers.  And what kind of system boasts platinum, gold, silver, and bronze options?  Why do the more “affordable” plans require extra fees for any but the most “essential” services?  Because the health care system reproduces the inequality that is the basis of capitalist exploitation and profit!

If you care about health, you have to fight for a completely different social system:  communism.

Communism is a classless society organized to benefit the masses. It will end money and profits, wage slavery and poverty.  That will allow us to end racism and sexism and to build a healthy society.
We will work together to guarantee the best possible health care for all workers and their families. Health care, like all necessities of life, will be available based strictly on need. Communism will not have different levels of healthcare for different groups of people.
ObamaCare was never meant to end inequality in health care.  It never even aimed to provide decent health care for everyone.  Health care reform was meant to maintain a minimally healthy workforce (and future army) while guaranteeing profits for companies selling insurance or health services or products.
On the “plus” side, it has saved the lives of some formerly uninsured people with pre-existing conditions who have finally been able to buy medical insurance.  But it has maintained all the capitalist aspects of the health care system for profit, including racism.
Now even the limited benefits of ObamaCare are under attack.  Trump and Congress can’t agree on when to repeal it or what to replace it with.  While they quarrel, tens of thousands could die from lack of medical care, while the banks reap more profits and the rich pay lower taxes.

Racism Is Cutting Edge of Capitalism’s Attack on All Workers

The attack on ObamaCare is part of a broader attack on the working class that goes far beyond just Trump.  Capitalism is a system where a few profit from the misery of the masses.  Racism is the cutting edge of its constant attacks on the health of the planet and the working class.
Billions of our class brothers and sisters around the world live in desperate poverty.  Deprived of the necessities of a healthy life, more than ten thousand people died from Ebola in West Africa and more than that from a preventable cholera epidemic in Haiti.  Thousands of babies, mostly in Brazil, have Zika-related birth defects.  In Flint and other US cities, drinking water is poisoned with lead.
Racism too often leads some workers to think, “That wouldn’t happen to me.”  But where workers, like US bus drivers, do have jobs that provide basic necessities, they often die young from stress-related heart attacks.
Republican attacks on ObamaCare trade on the racist lie that it (and other government programs) only help black and latino/a people.  But if they destroy it, some eight million white workers will be among those who lose access to health care.
All workers need to fight for a system – communism – where we tear down the walls that the bosses use to divide us.  Communism will create the material basis for a successful struggle to end racism finally.

Organize for Communist Revolution, Not Reform
The US health care system is by far the worst, and the most expensive among industrialized countries.  For decades, advocates of a “Single-Payer” (government-run) insurance plan (including Bernie Sanders) fought for “universal” health care.
National health insurance (or even a national health care system) hasn’t guaranteed decent health care in countries that have it. It doesn’t address the social conditions that make people sick. And in every country with national health care, the rich buy better care.
Many of those who fought for single-payer health care dropped that demand and joined the fight for ObamaCare. They hoped it would be “a step in the right direction.”  Now it’s on the chopping block.  So much for gradualism!  Let’s organize for communist revolution, rather than fighting for temporary reforms that build illusions in deadly capitalism.
Communism will transform health care in ways that we can only begin to imagine.  We’ll mobilize masses in collectives that care for each other and promote everyone’s physical and mental health.  Masses will help develop new knowledge about the human body, advancing medical science collectively through practice.
This is no time for fear and despair.  It’s time to seize the future!

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