CHICAGO, August 5 — “If you go ahead with this plan, you are murderers!” said a speaker at a community meeting, after a secret plan was revealed to close pediatric inpatient units at Stroger Cook County Hospital. The bosses’ plan to quietly phase out the pediatric patients was disrupted when someone leaked minutes of their secret June meeting, and resistance to this secret plan has been building since. On July 31, CEO Jay Shannon’s smug arrogance was shaken at a monthly Board meeting for Cook County Health and Hospitals as scores of outraged doctors, nurses and patients packed into the meeting room. Security told the local news that they couldn’t bring in their cameras to film the public meeting, while outside the Administration Building, hospital security guards failed to silence two dozen members of the United Methodist Women demonstrating in support.
Resistance Quickly Mobilized
After the leak, doctors, nurses, patients and community people organized in a few days so that the meeting room was standing room only. Witness after witness denounced the no-longer-secret racist plans that would take away the safety net for uninsured working class Black and immigrant kids.
PLP comrades who work at the hospital pointed out among their coworkers that capitalism’s racist “market reforms” in medical care were the real murderers. The de-funding and dismemberment of the Cook County Health and Hospital System, which has already lost two of its three hospitals and half of its clinics, has hit Black and immigrant workers hardest, who are a large percentage of our patients.
Our fight is to continue linking the many examples of local corruption to capitalism. For instance, the hospital bosses engineering the closure of the newborn unit whose patients will end up across the street in the private hospital, while the bosses rake in $25 million annually. Or the sweetheart deals that allow hospitals to profit from the procedures that used to be carried out more cheaply at the County. Or the multi-million dollar contracts to “consultants” that take their huge fees and leave, having fixed nothing.
Communists Make Link to Capitalist System
The bottom line is, under capitalism where profit is king, we can never have health care that is designed and carried out to maximize our health. What is maximized under this system is profits. Period.
Our work is to channel these upsurges of anger by the workers into a mass PLP and sweep the profiteering parasites out of our hospitals and out of our world with armed revolution. We also must help people make connections between racism and capitalism.
Under communism, we will share the things we produce and the services we provide. That kind of system, run by the working class, is called communism. Every fight we engage in today can serve as a training ground for the much larger fight in the future, the fight for political power to end this racist, oppressive capitalist system.