Brutal Class Warfare Disguised as Health Care ‘Reform’

It could have been the opening sketch for Saturday Night Live; all it needed was the “Live, from New York” tagline. But it was coming live from Washington, not New York, and the joke, brothers and sisters, was on you.

Yes, there has been a lot of hype and hyperbole about the passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act by the House of Representatives late on Saturday night.

But far from being the single-greatest piece of social reform in decades, this bill, now sitting in the Senate awaiting debate, is a slickly-packaged act of brutal class warfare.

The bill seeks to make it possible for every person to have access to health care. It bans the ability of health insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and it prevents them from using other legal tricks to deny people coverage.

What it does not do is prevent the insurance capitalists from using the oldest and most common trick in the book for denying care and coverage: pricing it out of range.

Keeping in line with the “free market” philosophy that has worked so well in recent years (in the housing market, in banking and credit, etc.), an “insurance exchange” is to be set up, which would, in theory, have insurance companies “compete” with each other — or, what is more likely, the companies fix the prices, creating a kind of “sub-prime” health insurance market for poor and working people. For the moment, a quasi-government-run “public option” will also be a part of this “exchange.” (This part may be removed by the Senate before it’s passed.)

Believe it or not, this is considered to be the “good” part of the bill; this is the part that supporters of President Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats are attempting to pass off as a “significant reform.”

However, this is only one small part of the real “reform” that was passed by the House with many cheers and applause.

By far, the most significant “reform” is the requirement that, by 2013, all Americans have some kind of health insurance.

This individual mandate is a direct attack on poor and working people, since it is mainly poor workers who are without health care coverage, forced to turn to hospital emergency rooms for basic medical care.

The combination of a ban on denying for pre-existing conditions and an individual mandate for coverage means that millions of workers will be forced to buy substandard health coverage from insurance companies at rates that will break them financially.

But this is not the only attack on working people included in the legislation.

A last-minute amendment to the bill, co-authored by a Republican and a Democrat, extended the ban on the use of government money to pay for abortions (the Hyde Amendment of 1977) to any private insurance plan that is included in the “exchange.”

Again, since working people will be the ones who most have to resort to the “exchange” (which also means using a paltry “subsidy” to offset costs), this amendment is a class-based ban on abortion services aimed directly at poor and working women.

But the most obscene provision of this bill is reserved for the working poor.

If you cannot even afford the “sub-prime” health plans being offered through the “exchange,” and you cannot get coverage through your job or a state service (like Medicaid), you will have to pay hundreds of dollars in an “excise tax” for not complying with the individual mandate requirement.

And if you cannot pay that tax, then you are subject to the whims of the Internal Revenue Service, who could charge you with “willful failure to pay,” a misdemeanor, or even “willful evasion,” a felony. Then a federal court can either impose a fine of thousands of dollars (because you couldn’t pay a tax of hundreds of dollars, because you couldn’t pay a premium of hundreds of dollars), or send you to jail or federal prison.

This is the real “reform” put forward by the White House and Congressional Democrats: Force workers to pay for worthless health insurance, and further restrict the rights of women workers, while threatening them with massive fines and imprisonment.

There is little doubt this is not what many workers bargained for when they voted for Obama and the Democratic Party last year. Nevertheless, this is what we’ve all got.

Over the coming weeks and months, there is little doubt that some of the liberal activist pressure groups — including not a few of those who call themselves socialist or communist — will call for protests over this bill, but they will be muted and passive, at best, in order to not risk any chance of the bill not passing through the Senate and ending up on the signing desk of Obama.

These groups have no concern for what poor and working people will face as a result of the ultimate passage of this bill, since they will not suffer as a result of it becoming law.

This is also just as true when it comes to the cynical opportunism of the rightwing teabaggers, who will try to use the excise tax to rally some sections of the working class in defense of the existing for-profit system.

Working people can only look to each other to push back against this attack on our very existence. If passed, this “reform” will criminalize the poorest parts of our class and economically brutalize millions more.

In order to defend our common interests, we as working people need to begin to organize ourselves, to call our own protests and rallies, to intervene in these town hall meetings to raise our own voices and our own demands, and to use the public platform created around this issue to raise the call for a health care system that works for working people — that is not privately owned, that is controlled by democratically-elected councils of patients and health care workers, that is paid for through an “excise tax” on the profits we create but the bosses take.

The passage of this bill by the House shows that we as workers can no longer afford to be passive observers of what is happening. We will be the most affected by whatever plan they end up adopting. The Workers Party calls on working people to join with us to organize and fight for health care that works for all working people.