‘Health care now’ fight rages on Capitol Hill

By Tim Wheeler

WASHINGTON — The fight for universal health care is raging on Capitol Hill with grassroots activists and progressive lawmakers making clear they will not support anything less than reform that provides a strong public option like Medicare.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, June 5, pointing out that the “overwhelming majority” of the 80-member caucus “prefer a single-payer approach” and warning that they will oppose any health care legislation that does not provide a public option.

Said Grijalva, “Americans deserve health care that favors patients over the health insurance companies. They were given decades to control costs, improve quality, and increase access but they have failed. At a minimum, we need to give them real competition in the form of a robust public plan that puts patients first.”

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., the caucus’s other co-chair, added, “Any legislation passed by Congress must include a robust and affordable public option that is available to every American and that provides coverage on a par with any plan put forth by private insurers. This is not a moment to act cautiously or to hide behind hollow buzzwords or skeletal programs … A competitive public option must be at the heart of this proposal.”

The progressive lawmakers also released a nine-point “CPC Principles for a Public Health Care Option,” stipulating that it must take effect concurrently with other reforms and not kick in at some future time of crisis — in other words, that it not be subject to the so-called “trigger” delay mechanism proposed by some.

The public plan must “consist of one entity, operated by the federal government” to keep administrative costs low and provide “a higher standard of care,” the principles specify. It must be “available to all individuals and employers across the nation without limitation” and allow patients their choice of doctors and other providers “similar to the traditional Medicare model.”

The federal government must provide “a level of subsidy and support that is no less than that received by private plans,” the Progressive Caucus principles say.

The government must also “redress historical disparities in underrepresented communities” and provide a “standard package of comprehensive benefits including dental, vision, mental health, and prescription drugs.”

Meanwhile, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., was the lead-off witness in a hearing June 10 on his “Medicare for All” single-payer health care bill (HR 676) before a subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee. Conyers decried Republican and Democratic lawmakers who have contrived to keep his bill “off the table,” adding that two national polls have shown that “universal, single-payer health care reform is the most popular health care system in the minds of most Americans.” He asked, “If you keep it off the table, what are you left with?”

Conyers pointed out that single-payer is “not a new idea … every industrialized country around the world has some variation of it except our own.”

A day earlier, Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., in an interview on CSPAN spoke of his single-payer bill S-703. The private health care system in the U.S., he charged, “is geared to making money for the private insurance companies,” not providing quality health care for the people. He decried the $2.3 trillion spent on health care each year, 18 percent of gross domestic product, or more than $8,000 for each man, woman and child. Yet 47 million people are still without health care insurance.

Any scheme to fix the system that leaves the insurance profiteers in control, he charged, “is like pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into a leaky bucket.”

Jacki Schechner, media spokesperson for Health Care for America Now, told the World, “We are in full support of a strong public health insurance plan. It is the only way to guarantee coverage, control costs, and insure quality and transparency.”

The grassroots movement for health care is mobilizing for a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill, Thursday, June 25, she said. “We are organizing for what will be the largest health care lobby day ever.”

“We will have visits to the offices of more than 300 members of the Senate and House to tell the lawmakers we need quality, affordable health care for all in 2009,” Schechner said. “Now is the time for people to step up and tell their senators and representatives we want it done.”

Jim Baldridge, a veteran health care worker in Baltimore, said the labor movement is filling buses with union members to attend the rally and lobby day. AFSCME, the Baltimore Central Labor Council and all the coalitions in support of health care reform are mobilizing. “It includes people across the health care reform spectrum whether it be for single-payer or the public option,” he said.

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W.E.B. Du Bois Joins the Communist Party

Gus Hall
Communist Party of the USA
New York, New York

On this first day of October 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in the Communist Party of the United States. I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion, but at last my mind is settled.

In college I heard the name of Karl Marx, but read none of his works, nor heard them explained. At the University of Berlin, I heard much of those thinkers who had definitely answered the theories of Marx, but again we did not study what Marx himself had said. Nevertheless, I attended meetings of the Socialist Party and considered myself a Socialist.

On my return to America, I taught and studies for sixteen years. I explored the theory of socialism and studied the organized social life of American Negroes; but still I neither read nor heard much of Marxism. Then I came to New York as an official of the new NAACP and editor of The Crisis magazine. The NAACP was capitalist-oriented and expected support from rich philanthropists.

But it had a strong socialist element in its leadership in persons like Mary Ovington, William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell. Following their advice, I joined the Socialist Party in 1911. I knew nothing of practical socialist politics and in the campaign on 1912 I found myself unwilling to vote for the Socialist ticket, but advised Negroes to vote for Wilson. This was contrary to Socialist Party rules and consequently I resigned from the Socialist Party.

For the next twenty years I tried to develop a political way of life for myself and my people. I attacked the Democrats and Republicans for monopoly and disenfranchisement of Negroes; I attacked the Socialists for trying to segregate Southern Negro members; I praised the racial attitudes of the Communists, but opposed their tactics in the case of the Scottsboro Boys and their advocacy of a Negro state. At the same time, I began the stud Karl Marx and the Communists; I read Das Kapital and other Communist literature; I hailed the Russian Revolution of 1917, but was puzzled by the contradictory news from Russia.

Finally in 1926, I began a new effort; I visited the Communist lands. I went to the Soviet Union in 1926, 1936, 1949 and 1959; I saw the nation develop. I visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. I spent ten weeks in China, traveling all over the land. Then this summer, I rested a month in Rumania.

I was early convinced that socialism was an excellent way of life, but I thought it might be reached by various methods. For Russia, I was convinced she had chosen the only way open to her at the time. I saw Scandinavia choosing a different method, halfway between socialism and capitalism. In he United States, I saw Consumers Cooperation as a path from capitalism to socialism, while in England, France and Germany developed in the same direction in their own way. After the Depression and the Second World War, I was disillusioned. The progressive movement in the United States failed. The Cold War started. Capitalism called communism a crime.

Today I have reached my conclusion:

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.

Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life. It is a difficult and hard end to reach—it has and will make mistakes, but today it marches triumphantly on in education and science, in home and food, with increased freedom of thought and deliverance from dogma. In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.

The path of the American Communist Party is clear: It will provide the United States with a real third party and thus restore democracy to this land. It will call for:

1. Public ownership of natural resources and of all capital.
2. Public control of transportation and communications.
3. Abolition of poverty and limitation of personal income.
4. No exploitation of labor.
5. Social medicine, with hospitalization and care for the old.
6. Free education for all.
7. Training for jobs and jobs for all.
8. Discipline for growth and reform.
9. Freedom under law.
10. No dogmatic religion.

These aims are not crimes. They are practiced increasingly over the world. No nation can call itself free which does not allow its citizens to work for these ends.

W.E.B. Du Bois