“Medical conditions like this just happen and that’s God’s plan. My sister had Lupus and she just died two days ago. It happened so fast. I dreamed about her last night. Why did God take her? That’s not for me to know…It’s a spiritual thing,” said a patient as she lay in bed.
Because of diabetes she had both legs amputated below the knees, and she suffered from hypertension and HIV. But in the housing project where she lives, her story is not unique. Recently another child died of cardiac arrest following a severe asthma attack, the third in a month for one Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crew. There’s nothing spiritual about heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, HIV and asthma murdering black workers and youth. It’s called racism and it’s the plague of capitalism.
On January 14, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) released its “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (MMWR), focusing on racial disparities in U.S. health care. Among the findings:
• Babies born to black women are up to three times as likely to die in infancy;
• High blood pressure is twice as common among blacks as whites;
• Blacks die of strokes and heart disease much more commonly than whites, and die younger;
• Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans, whether gay or straight, all have higher rates of new infection with the AIDS virus than whites, and the situation is worsening.
In 2007, the CDC reported that between 1979 and 2004, “Diabetes death rates for black youths were consistently higher than those for white youths. Additionally, whereas diabetes mortality did not change substantially for white youths during 1994-2004, death rates for black youths increased significantly.”
The U.S. Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality website reports that among pre-school children hospitalized for asthma, only 7% of black and 2% of Latino children are prescribed routine medications to prevent future asthma-related hospitalizations, compared with 21% of white children. The inequality in access to asthma medication is racist murder, considering that a routine asthma attack untreated with prescribed medication ends in death.
The increased deaths from diabetes and asthma are the racist results of mass poverty. The bosses tell us we need to make “better choices.” Michelle Obama exercises with poor kids and billionaire mayor Bloomberg wants to ban soda purchases from food stamps. Meanwhile, they offer mass racist unemployment, police terror, cutbacks and war. If they are so concerned, then we should have free medical clinics and decent supermarkets with fresh fruits and vegetables in every housing project and school. We’re not killing our children — they are!
The situation for workers in NY State grows even more desperate. The NY Post reported (1/22) that Governor Cuomo’s billion-dollar Medicaid cuts will force 10-12 more hospitals to close. Stephen Berger, a Cuomo advisor overseeing the cuts, cynically asked, “How many [hospitals] are really necessary?” Two paragraphs later the article reports: “Many of the hospitals teetering on the brink of financial collapse are located in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.”
PLP public health care workers are fighting for life. Our PL club is developing ties with, and spreading CHALLENGE to health care workers and those we serve, building anti-racist unity against murderous cutbacks and layoffs. Communist leadership is the antidote to the racist poison killing our children and destroying our jobs. In the course of this struggle we can build a Party organization in our community, at the nearby community clinic and hospital. The day the Post article appeared, hospital workers photocopied, posted and distributed 200 copies throughout the hospital’s Emergency Department, held informal meetings and made contacts to expand the fight-back.
As one veteran paramedic put it after reading the Post article: “This is war. Every worker in this city should respond to this attack by going for broke and shutting it down, so not a single thing moves. Nurses, bus drivers, teachers, everything. Everyone united. That’s how it used to be done and that’s how it should be done.”
Workers in the community and the hospital have been beaten and abused in every way by some aspect of this system. We are forced to sit and watch as our children are killed before our eyes by treatable diseases like asthma. In New York City, Port au-Prince or Gaza, building PLP means choosing life.