Chicago’s Apartheid Trauma Care

CHICAGO, November 22 — On any given Saturday night in the trauma unit at Mount Sinai Hospital on Chicago’s West Side, many Black and Latin men are admitted with multiple gunshot wounds. For this comrade and his co-workers, it happens so regularly that it seems almost routine. But there’s nothing acceptable about the street violence—an outgrowth of the daily economic violence of capitalism—that brutalizes members of our class. Equally unacceptable are the proposed “solutions” by the city’s ruling class, from more killer cops on the street to stricter gun legislation to longer prison sentences.
Murderous Care Black Workers
About 30 years ago, when a trauma care network was first established in Chicago, a number of Level 1 trauma centers were created on the city’s North and West sides and nearby suburbs. But only two served the South Side, where the majority of the population is Black: the Michael Reese Hospital and the University of Chicago Medical Center. In 1988, two years after opening it, the obscenely wealthy, Rockefeller-created University of Chicago closed its adult trauma center, citing large financial losses. Today it accepts only patients 15 and younger. Michael Reese Hospital’s trauma center closed in 1991.
The city’s failure to maintain a Level 1 trauma center on the South Side is racist to the core. Most Black victims of major trauma must be transported up to ten miles to a hospital with adequate facilities. According to the American Journal of Public Health, people shot more than five miles from the nearest trauma center are 23 percent more likely to die in transit. Of the two thousand-plus gunshot wound victims in Chicago in 2015 to date, more than 800 fall outside that five-mile radius (Chicago Tribune, 9/11/15).
Racist Liberals Attack; Workers Fight Back
For those who view Democrats as the “lesser evil,” the liberal leaders’ approach to health care in Chicago is instructive. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley did little or nothing during his 22 years in office to re-open a trauma center on the South Side. Current Mayor Rahm Emanuel led the charge to close half the city’s mental health clinics in 2012. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle appears ready to approve the closing of pediatric inpatient services at Stroger Hospital, which serves mostly Black and immigrant workers and their families (see CHALLENGE, 11/11/15).
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is building a $500 million presidential library near the University of Chicago.
Finally after years of pressure from working-class activists, the University of Chicago is partnering with Sinai Health Systems to create a trauma center within Holy Cross Hospital in the city’s Southwest side. But workers must put this “victory” into context. It will do nothing to fight the poverty, desperation and violence created by the capitalist profit system.
Instead of worker-on-worker violence, the international working class needs worker-on-capitalist violence with a mass working-class Red army. We need an army to fight back against the racist Chicago Police Department for the murder of Laquan McDonald. We need to turn the guns around in the escalating imperialist bloodbath in Syria—and aim them at the capitalist bosses on all sides.
Only a communist society will make workers’ health a priority. Only communism can eradicate all the traumas of capitalism—for good.