Capitalist Hospital Dumps its Sickest Patients

BAY AREA, October 9—California Pacific Medical Center, the biggest and richest hospital chain in San Francisco, wanted to dump its sickest and most frail long-term patients out of the city, where they frequently die without family support. It’s not profitable for capitalism to provide a healthy future for our class. The bosses’ profits will always come before workers’ needs. In the Progressive Labor Party, we say that a system that won’t guarantee proper care for its most vulnerable workers doesn’t deserve to exist!
CPMC plans to close its Subacute Unit at St. Luke’s Hospital, a community hospital in a poor and Latino neighborhood that CPMC took over and then tried to close. Subacute units give long-term care for very sick or frail patients, typically on ventilators or with tracheotomies, sometimes for decades. Patients are almost always poor and on Medicaid/Medi-CAL, which pays hospitals very little, so hospitals have closed their subacute units, causing a nationwide crisis.
Subacute patients need family members to visit and advocate for them on an almost daily basis, and often die within a year after long-distance transfers. CPMC’s Subacute Unit is the only one in town, and patients were told they would be transferred to other cities, even though CPMC is building two new hospitals in town that could accommodate them.  
Workers’ Power
The CPMC patients’ families are tight-knit, seeing each other almost every day on the unit. They are fighting back and have forced CPMC to say they’ll accept current subacute patients at their other facilities in San Francisco. But the families, looking beyond themselves to the future, demand CPMC accept new subacute patients and that the city create new subacute beds. CPMC has begun to spread contradictory information and rumors to confuse and discredit the families and break up their unity, which is making the families even angrier.
But this is not just about how hospitals are willing to kill patients for profit; it’s also about how capitalist culture and ideology debases our humanity. Capitalist culture blasts more individualism and callousness and more acceptance of the bosses’ values. They push the idea that if you’re not generating profits, you’re unproductive and a parasite. The newspaper stories of the subacute patients’ problems have produced comments like, “It’s shocking that younger people don’t revolt against spending so much money on extreme care for 80 year-olds with no means to provide for themselves.”
This lack of empathy is a product of capitalism in crisis. We struggle to hold our heads above water and find the time and energy to develop good values in our families. Hating capitalism and working to overcome it helps keep your sanity. Otherwise, the sight of capitalism’s atrocities numbs you, makes you suicidal, or makes you hate people. Parents struggle to teach their kids sharing and helping each other. Communists struggle to make all society be like that.
Only Communism Will Heal Our Class
For communists, the slogan “To each according to need,” has guided us since the days of Karl Marx. In other words, we don’t rely on the bosses who will never put our needs above their profits. Their system, capitalism, always has been, and always will be a system of profit, greed, racism and sexism. Capitalism is a system where workers only have worth as long as they can labor and produce profit for a boss. Only a system truly based on the needs of workers, communism, will bring us decent health and healthcare. The CPMC Subacute patients’ families are an inspiration.