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   Vol. 67/No. 38           November 3, 2003  
 
 
Lifetime, free health care for all!
(editorial)
 
In one labor struggle after another in the United States today, health care is a central issue. Supermarket workers in Southern California, bus mechanics in Los Angeles, and meat packers at Tyson Foods in Wisconsin are among those waging strikes to oppose the bosses’ attempts to shift more of the costs of health insurance onto working people. Coal miners in Utah and laundry workers in Washington, D.C., are fighting for a union, in part, to get health coverage. Their actions highlight a serious problem facing the entire working class.

Nearly 44 million people in the United States have no health insurance. The number of uninsured jumped by 2.4 million last year, the biggest rise in a decade, largely as a result of layoffs and bosses eliminating coverage or making it prohibitively expensive. Today only 4 percent of large employers still guarantee full medical coverage without charge, compared to 21 percent in 1988. Bosses are increasingly shifting the burden onto workers. The amount workers pay in premiums for family coverage skyrocketed by 50 percent in the last three years, and their out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs rose even more. A routine doctor’s visit in New York can cost $100. As health-care costs shoot up and working people are callously chopped off the rolls of “health maintenance” businesses, increasing numbers are crowding emergency rooms and waiting for hours because they can’t afford another way to get medical treatment.

In response to this catastrophe, the bosses shrug and say it’s “not realistic” to offer full coverage. With health care a lucrative commodity, owners of hospitals, drug monopolies, and insurance giants are raking in huge profits. All health-care “reforms” by Democrats and Republicans are designed to reinforce this profit-driven medical system, undermine Medicare as a universal entitlement, and make working people increasingly fend for ourselves.

The working-class view of this question is the opposite of the bosses’ approach. Free access to health care must be a guaranteed part of workers’ social wage. Instead of leaving health care as an individual’s problem, and as a “fringe benefit” to be negotiated—and eroded—plant by plant and industry by industry, the union movement needs to take this fight to the political arena on behalf of all working people. Labor must demand that social security be expanded to guarantee cradle-to-grave health care for all, along with workers’ compensation, disability pay, unemployment insurance, and retirement pensions. Along this road, more and more working people will recognize the inability of capitalism to meet these most basic necessities. They will also see the need to organize a working-class movement to overturn the rule of finance capital and take political power, in order to begin reorganizing society to meet the needs of the vast majority.  
 
 
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