Brooklyn, NY, February 12 —Brooklyn workers are facing a new racist attack. The State of New York, along with hospital administration, has unveiled a plan to close Downstate Medical Center (DMC). Ten years ago, they had a similar plan. Downstate workers, patients, and the community mounted a fight that helped save it. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated in and led parts of that struggle. In the end, Downstate stayed open. But around the same time, two other Brooklyn hospitals that DMC took over, Victory Memorial and (despite prolonged workers’ fightback), Long Island College Hospital, were closed. During the pandemic, Downstate was designated a COVID hospital. Workers fought tirelessly to care for the sick. Some workers died.

Closing Downstate, which is in the center of Brooklyn, is racist. Life expectancy is years lower in Black and Latin neighborhoods in eastern and central Brooklyn. Part of the reason for that is that these neighborhoods have fewer providers, fewer staffed hospital beds, fewer practitioners who accept Medicaid, and lower hospital quality. Since the pandemic, life expectancy has decreased significantly and disparities have widened. Since then, in a plan similar to the one being proposed for Downstate, Kingsbrook, another central/east Brooklyn hospital, has been closed. 

One key measure of racism in healthcare is maternal/infant mortality. Maternal mortality of Black workers is three times that of white workers. Black workers experience infant mortality rates more than double that of white workers. These disparities have worsened since COVID. It is estimated that 84 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable with proper pre- and perinatal care. There are only two regional perinatal care centers in Brooklyn whose labor and delivery beds average 93 percent full.  One of them is Downstate, Manhattan has more than double the staffed labor and delivery beds as Brooklyn. 

So here we are ten years later fighting again for Downstate to survive. The ruling imperialists, in mortal competition with the Chinese bosses and others,  need to save money on healthcare and other human services to funnel into their various wars for world domination. As long as they run things, we will never have decent equitable health care. We will always be fighting for scraps.

So, if we can’t win, why should we fight back? For one thing, sometimes we can force them to back down temporarily. Our fight 10 years ago saved thousands of lives during the Covid pandemic, not to mention thousands of jobs.
More importantly, our class can learn in the battle to see through the tricks used to divide us: racism, sexism, and nationalism. Our class can emerge stronger, especially if some join PLP and dedicate themselves to getting rid of the rule of the few over the many once and for all and help build an egalitarian communist society, where healthcare would be allocated as needed, not for profit and large segregated areas would disappear as we moved to make all workplaces and neighborhoods free of racist and sexist super-exploitation.