Chicago Healthcare Workers Blast Racist Cuts

CHICAGO, October 21— Workers at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital are continuing their uphill fight to save pediatric services. Closing these hospitals is racist, sexist murder. Working together within this hospital struggle, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends are also raising the potential for a new communist world.
The mostly Black and Latino workers we’re rallying have historically been the mass base for PLP. The response of most of them is the same: “What? Close Pediatrics at the County? They can’t do that!” Doctors, nurses and public health professionals have taken to the streets with flyers and petitions. Many who read our leaflets volunteer to help, invite us to speak at their churches or take extra literature. Despite the stream of phone calls into the office of the killer politician responsible, County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, we get only hollow promises. The racist Preckwinkle has done nothing to restrain the administration as it moves ahead inexorably to grind down the department that cares for Chicago’s working-class Black and immigrant kids. Why should she? She serves the bosses, not working-class children.
Public hospitals in most cities have been closed or privatized, as the capitalist bosses lie about “better quality” and “more efficient” healthcare. In reality, this is a racist attack on workers! These changes are driven by profit, not health. As full-service hospitals shut down and are replaced by scattered urgent care centers, families must travel outside their neighborhoods to find more than basic care. Specialized teaching and children’s hospitals are not found in working-class neighborhoods. Using them forces families, especially low-income or single-parent families, to make wrenching decisions: Stay with my sick child in the hospital or keep my job? Pay for transportation or pay for food? Moreover, children treated at the big teaching hospitals are less likely to get adequate follow-up care if they’re families are insured by Medicaid.
Care Under Communism
How would medical care for children look under communism? One hint comes from examining medicine in China in the 1950s and 1960s under socialism, at the time seen as a halfway house to communism. Workers there developed a system that valued health and safety. The revolution raised the life standards of the masses. A million peasants and youth, known as barefoot doctors, were trained to provide healthcare in rural areas. Over a span of ten years, workers doubled the life expectancy in rural China and cut the infant mortality rate in half; diseases like syphilis were eliminated. Millions of workers were saved from premature and avoidable deaths from poverty, malnutrition and a lack of healthcare. This advance was possible only under a worker-run society.
Today, with the Chinese revolution reversed and market capitalism restored, workers in China—like those in Chicago—once again suffer under disastrous health conditions. That is why PLP fights directly for a communist revolution, with power resting in the masses of workers worldwide through Party leadership.
Capitalist Healthcare Makes Workers Sick
According to a report published by the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. ranks lowest in healthcare compared to other large capitalist countries. There are two reasons: 1) the U.S. bosses’ aim to remain the world’s top imperialists limits their investments in domestic matters like healthcare, education, and infrastructure; 2) vicious U.S. racism, with its foundation in the enslavement of Black people and the genocide of indigenous people, enables the bosses to keep the working class oppressed and divided—for now.  
After a recent inspection at Stroger Hospital, the Joint Commission found a number of deficiencies, especially in documentation and equipment. Now people are wondering if the administration’s ultimate goal of closing and privatizing the facility may be at hand.
The trend to cut everything in the public sector— schools, hospitals, housing — is part of the capitalist ruler’s strategy to conserve and centralize resources for the next big imperialist war.
The movement against budget cuts must be built and communists must be in the thick of it. But we will not be able to stop the imperialists from destroying millions of lives in the next war. What we can try to do is strengthen our ability to fight and develop ties with others who fight with us. Our only real victory is recruiting fellow fighters to PLP to help build a new world.
Communism will eliminate the primary source of chronic illness, the stress brought on by racism, sexism and oppressive conditions of work and life. The tension of life under capitalism increases the risk of all common chronic diseases, from high blood pressure to cancer. Under communism, the standard of health literacy and healthcare will be raised for everyone. Building a society based on cooperation and sharing instead of competition and exploitation would reduce the need for many medical treatments. But when these treatments are needed, people would get them for free, at a uniform high standard. Fighting for that new world is the only real treatment for the disease of capitalism.