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NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2007Workshop TalksIraq war follows wounded vets homeby Htun Lin The mistreatment of soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, after coming home from Iraq with all manner of severe trauma, has shocked the country since being exposed by a Washington Post reporter. Others had been writing about this since the war started in 2003. The current expose came on the heels of a dramatic decline in Bush’s popularity because of the quagmire in Iraq, which resulted in Bush’s party getting thrown out of power in Congress. Now politicians are tripping over themselves to get in front of the microphones to express their “shock." As usual a general in charge of soldier medical care thought nothing of calling the exposé “yellow journalism," but this time he was summarily fired. The larger story is not just about lack of sanitary conditions or mold infestation at Walter Reed. The larger story is that workers and their health are expendable under capitalism. Casualties of the Iraq war like Tammy Duckworth, a double amputee who almost won a seat in Congress in a heavily Republican district in Illinois, said the problem was not the doctors and nurses who gave their all toward her recovery. The problem was the bureaucracy that did nothing when they were caught ill-prepared to handle the level of casualties and need for long term care as a result of this war. Health care providers were swamped with way more than the number of patients they could handle. This kind of medical neglect by bureaucracy is business as usual in the shop where I work. Frontline health care providers are constantly admonished to remember that “health care is a business" that requires controlling expending of resources. Constant cost cutting over the years has brought treatment to substandard levels. No doubt this was also the case at Walter Reed. Where I work nurses have fought and won some quality control provisions in their contract. They then fought for and won the passage of legislation mandating specific care standards enforced by regulatory agencies. This has only changed the nature of the intense antagonism on the shop floor. When a state compliance auditor comes through, a hospital official becomes obsessed for that moment with satisfying often superficial technical criteria for compliance. There is a palpable frustration level felt daily in the hospital. One day I heard a chief physician in the ER tell a hospital administrator, “I understand your preoccupation with state regulatory compliance issues, but I’m trying to treat patients here and that is not the same thing." More regulation doesn’t relieve the crisis because, for the bureaucrats, quality care is nothing more than a public relations game. For frontline health care workers and patients alike, quality of care is a life and death issue. One can easily imagine similar kinds of frustrations experienced by care providers at Walter Reed that went unheeded by bureaucrats. Now after the spotlight on scandalous conditions at Walter Reed, Bush is promising more regulatory oversight. Capital will find ways around regulation because the human being is not its priority. Over 200,000 die annually from “medical errors." It is the conditions under which health care providers are forced to work that causes those “medical errors," which is a euphemism for HMO abuse. The Bush administration early on prohibited news coverage and photographs of soldiers returning from Iraq in body bags. Severely wounded veterans are a living refutation of U. S. victory in Iraq. So like veterans, along with those segments of society with the least political voice--workers without insurance, the unemployed, immigrants and prisoners--receive the worst health care. A federal judge even ruled that the California Department of Corrections cannot be allowed to run its medical services because of its criminal neglect. On March 20, a San Francisco judge refused to send a convicted robber with a medical condition to prison because it would be giving him a death sentence. The current uproar over abuses at Walter Reed can open up a real discussion over health care as a human value in-and-of-itself, in contrast to policy games politicians play as they broker human needs made hostage to capital’s prerogatives. What does it say about a society where average human beings, who might otherwise avoid danger, have to put themselves in harm’s way just so they can receive an education and health care? The ongoing war and casualty rate with returning veterans recounting their struggles to be whole in the face of bureaucratic negligence, has brought new urgency to the issue. Health care as a human value encompasses all whose lives have been mutilated by this war--returning vets as well as Iraqi civilians, casualties from U.S. militarism as well as sectarian terror. Only when workers control production and solidarize with other workers across borders will priorities and this inhumanity be reversed. |
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