www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2005Workshop TalksPlanned deaths from medical cutbacksby Htun Lin There is an ongoing war which has claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 Americans every year. All those who have died in this war died unnecessarily on our own soil. These Americans died in hospital beds from medical error. That incredible death toll, according to the American Medical Association, is the result of medical errors committed by overworked healthcare workers in a cutthroat HMO industry constantly cutting funds and resources to deny care to those who need it. Self-righteous religious fundamentalists, right-wing politicians and opportunists of all sorts tripped all over themselves in a rush to "save" one patient, Terri Schiavo, who had been brain dead for 15 years. That same week, while participating in the morality charade, Congress shamefully passed without fanfare legislation to reduce the benefits of tens of thousands of permanently disabled Medicaid recipients. What about the deaths that will result from these cuts? State legislatures are also on the attack. For example, California is seizing the homes of Medi-Cal recipients. Employers are demanding cost shifting through huge deductibles and co-pays from workers to pay for their own healthcare. But the most deadly "cost shift" to workers is simply denying services and nursing staff. To add insult to injury, just days before Congress cut Medicaid funding, it also passed new legislation to restrict a person’s access to bankruptcy protections, a law to help the loan shark industry. The number one cause of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. is exploding healthcare expenses. HMO-BACKED SMEARS Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor-turned-governor, is now one of big business’s generals in this war. He rode to power on his Hollywood image as a lone action hero out to clean out the "special interests" in Sacramento. With money donated by industry special interests from real estate developers to HMOs, the governor has been flooding the state’s airwaves with slick ads to smear the state’s nurses and teachers as "special interests." The "Terminator" seemed unstoppable, until now. The California Nurses’ Association (CNA) has been winning their fight for quality care. They gained pivotal legislation for patient safety mandating a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio which then-governor Davis signed into law. After the recall vote, as one of his first executive acts, Schwarzenegger suspended that law. He was repaying his special interest sponsors in the HMO industry. The court of appeals has since rescinded Schwarzenegger’s order. Schwarzenegger has finally met his match--the nurses of California, whose ranks are joined by teachers and firefighters in this battle as they show up at his fundraising events. As one sign held up by an RN at an anti-Schwarzenegger rally put it: "Nurses: 2, Arnold: 0." Others read: "Patients are our special-interest" and "Dedicated to patient health, not corporate wealth." The governor’s approval ratings have plummeted in the polls. But he is still hell-bent on attacking unionized nurses and teachers fighting to maintain adequate staffing ratios as special interests. For a misogynist governor, his most formidable adversary in real life has turned out to be workers whose vocation is still considered "women’s work." It is a profession still largely staffed by women who understand concretely what it means to give and restore life. EXPENSIVELY NOT TREATING PATIENTS Our HMOs continue to spend more money than ever, more than any other nation on earth. The difference is, those extra billions are not spent on caring for the sick. While they have spent the last decade cutting back health services and frontline workers dedicated to patient care, they have nevertheless increased spending on personnel dedicated to denying patient care. As Paul Krugman put it in THE NEW YORK TIMES on April 22, "At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker." In my own shop, management has recently been on a hiring binge of business office employees, for "revenue enhancement." We employees have joked that half of us were hired to improve the revenue collection rate, and the other half to monitor the first half. The measure of our humanity is how we treat fellow human beings at their greatest point of weakness and need--when they are felled by sickness and disease. In this era of healthcare as commodity, barbarism has an accountant’s face. Our current healthcare crisis in the U.S. is in essence a battle between the concrete labor of workers versus the insurance industry’s focus on their financial interests. The needless 200,000 deaths a year in health care are the toll of an unprovoked war on workers. That is why the current battle shaping up in California will be pivotal. It’s a battle between Schwarzenegger’s forces in the corporate world versus the nurses and teachers who want to reclaim their own activity and its importance as a fundamental human value. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
