Health care struggles from the perspective of Marx's concepts of alienated labor

Health care workers, especially nurses, are in the forefront of today's highly visible effort to achieve single payer health care. However, the focus on single payer comes on the heels of two decades of a new kind of labor movement in the health care workplace over the issues of speedup and restructuring. This is the tenth anniversary of the California Nurses' Association 18 month wave of strikes at Kaiser HMO in which they won some unprecedented contractual rights over the care they provide. Health care is now over one seventh of the U.S. economy. The forces that make work an alienating experience under capitalism have thoroughly infected the health care workplace, where there's a constant struggle with bean counting overlords who constrain the concrete labor of delivering care. This session will address how the struggle against what Marx called alienated labor has helped shape the demand for single payer and reaches beyond any law that that keeps capitalism intact.