BROOKLYN, NY, December 31 — Downstate Medical Center here, whose patients come from an underserved predominantly Caribbean working-class community, is threatened with closing, or privatization or both. Workers at the hospital, which belongs to New York State, are in the fight of their lives. We are living in times when the major imperialists who run this country need to divert money from health care and other human services to spend trillions on their fight with other imperialists over world domination.

The threat to Downstate comes against a background of other hospital closings and forced mergers. Brooklyn’s Interfaith hospital was forced into bankruptcy just last month and will be closed. At Downstate, Gov. Cuomo, who is also planning huge Medicare and Medicaid cuts, hired John Williams as the new President of Downstate. Williams and his allies already have a long history of gutting healthcare and closing or privatizing hospitals. 

At George Washington University in D.C.,where Williams made his reputation, he was made Vice President in charge of the medical school and hospital because the Trustees liked the way he had helped sell 80% of the hospital to for-profit Universal Health Services. He did such a good job, he was able to collect salaries from both GWU and Universal — until they found out! To balance the medical center’s budget, which had been losing millions each year, Williams closed five suburban clinics and the HMO. He also sold off the faculty practice plan and laid off 500 staff members and 50 doctors. Now Cuomo wants him to do the same here, and is paying him over $750,000 a year to do the hatchet job.

Many of us have worked at Downstate for years. We have worked through hiring freezes and pay lags when there were cutbacks. We have worked short-staffed, trying our best to meet the needs of our patients. We have fought for adequate staff.   Depending on the state of the capitalist economy, things have been bad or worse. It has been no picnic for workers or patients in this state-run hospital.

Williams would redefine our medical center as a “clinical enterprise.”  His plans likely include some form of privatization, possibly a closure of Downstate. He threatens the latter if we workers and patients don’t sacrifice. We must demand these cuts be rescinded, and that more government money be available for care of uninsured workers. 

The bosses and their henchmen like Williams are trying to take back hard-won benefits from the remaining union workers by spreading the lie that we have it “so good.” It is the height of hypocrisy when people like Williams and his other high-paid six-figure cronies try to paint regular state workers as greedy and lazy!

What kind of system makes the healthcare of the working class (especially the black, Latino and immigrant workers) secondary to profits? For our patients and our co-workers, we reject sacrificing for the capitalist system. Read CHALLENGE to learn of workers’ struggles around the world against imperialism and for communism.