Letter: Capitalist healthcare is a racist atrocity

It was interesting to hear about healthcare rationing in California and other states overwhelmed by Covid-19 infected patients. I was a respiratory therapist for over 40 years, and I recall healthcare rationing hospitals serving mostly Black & Latin communities on the south and west sides of Chicago for decades.
The main ways rationing is practiced in these working-class neighborhood hospitals is through lack of staff and supplies. In a large medical and trauma center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where most of the patients are white, there were two respiratory therapists in the emergency room (E.R.), 24 hours a day.  In one of the busiest trauma centers in Chicago, on the west side, a therapist would be assigned to cover one or two patient floors, in addition to the emergency room.
Many times, we were busy giving care on the patient floors, when we would have to stop and scurry to the emergency room for a trauma emergency. The patients on the regular floors were short-changed in their care, because we would be unable to be in two places at the same time. On many occasions, treatments could not be given because we were occupied attending to patients in the E.R. Still, in other instances, patients in the E.R. would be waiting for treatment while we attended to patients on the regular floors or other seriously ill patients in the E.R.
Lack of equipment was also a common problem. Many times I had to look for necessary equipment, like a flowmeter, used to deliver oxygen, or other equipment and supplies to set-up a ventilator used to help patients breathe.
The short staffing was not restricted to patient floors and the E.R.  I’ll never forget the night I had to take care of 11  patients who were all on ventilators in the intensive care unit. We had to keep track of our productivity during the 12-hour shift. On that night my productivity was over 20  hours, and this form of speed-up was not unusual.  They stopped requiring us to track our productivity when it was obvious that all too often, we did more than 12 hours worth of work, and it became the basis for  complaints.
The hospital’s deliberate short staffing and lack of equipment serving mostly Black and Latin communities is racist health care. It leads to unsafe working conditions and substandard care or rationing. On the west side of Chicago, life expectancy is 69 years, while six miles away downtown, life expectancy is 85 years. This gap is a result of capitalist oppression of all workers, but especially of Black & Latin workers. Capitalists worship money and profits above workers’ health, and systemic racism is their number one weapon to keep workers divided and keep society unequal.
We fought back with a petition that over 60  people signed, demanding more staff and better equipment. We were forced to use devices that were obsolete (spare parts were not being made for some breathing machines). The hospital bosses started a witch hunt to find the organizers of the petition. Instead being intimidated, many workers spoke up about the racist working conditions. We got more staff and new equipment, but like most reform victories under this system, it didn’t last long.  When workers left, they would not be replaced, and the equipment was not maintained by management.
Rotten healthcare is bad for patients and hospital workers. The Covid-19 pandemic further  exposes capitalism’s public health failures and gross racist inequities. Black workers make up 30 percent of the population in Chicago, but 72 percent of the reported Covid-19 cases.  Black workers are seven times more likely to contract and die from the virus than other workers living in the same city. Structural and systemic racism kills.
We must fight back and build the Progressive Labor Party, because only communism can ensure a healthy future for our class.