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Indybay Feature

SF March to Pass Medicare For All Now

by Leon Kunstenaar
Protesters vow to take issue to UN as human rights complaint if M4A is not passed
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Photos: Leon Kunstenaar / Pro Bono Photo

The march began at Justin Herman Plaza at San Francisco's Embarcadero.

A skit was performed illustrating the vast sums the US spends on warfare and could easily be redirected to healthcare for all.

As the marchers went down Market Street, music and slogans were amplified throughout by Robb Godshaw's bicycle mounted PA system.

A rally in front of City Hall started with a moment of silence for the millions of victims of our country's inadequate health care.

Speakers included:
  • Assemblymember Alex Lee AD25
  • Janani Ramachandran, State Assembly Candidate in District 18
  • Daniel Hilsinger, Singer/Songwriter, Cancer Survivor/lead organizer for March for our Lives (Oakland, 2018)
  • Dr. Ana Maria Malinow; Jupiter Peraza, Director of Social Justice Initiatives, The Transgender District
  • Marielle Reataza, MD, Senior Program Manager, Asia Pacific Partners for Empowerment, Advocacy and Leadership
  • Aidan Rodriguez-Swanson, Field Representative, Office of Asm.
  • Ash Kalra; Eric Curry (MC), Congressional Candidate, CA-12
See all high resolution photos here.
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Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
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Stop Privatization of Our Healthcare!
For profit healthcare is a cherished profit center for the capitalist class. The bosses have the working masses trapped in a desperate struggle to keep ahead of perpetually increasing medical coverage costs.

They love and want to keep their system; investors reap profits holding shares in big insurance, big pharma, bio-tech and profitable provider groups; this keeps steady streams of income funneling from our insurance premiums, copays and tax dollars. This arrangement sucks the workers' paychecks dry to ensure profits for the big shareholders.

Unnecessary competition between firms, superfluous administrative, regulatory and litigation costs drive up base costs passed on to us, the client. In other words, we pay these companies to fight for legislation to limit and deny care!

The united front committee for a labor party says this is a crime against the working masses, oppressed and poor people.

We demand: Socialized Medicine to Ensure Quality Health Care For All!
Because the labor movement is tied by ten thousand strings to the capitalist Democratic Party, workers have no independent political voice. Workers are constrained by the union leadership’s commitment to the Democrats.

The cross-class alliance with the bosses in one of the most powerful forces working to prevent us from acting independently as a class and initiating class struggle actions such as indefinite strikes, workplace occupations, solidarity strikes to crush Taft Hartley and the Taylor Law, and that will lead to the formation of a labor party and a worker’s government.

The Labor Party must be politically independent of the bosses. This is essential if we wish to win the fight for medical care for all and to ensure healthcare as a right. We need to socialize the medical and healthcare industry including Big Pharma, the insurance houses, hospitals, clinics, and medical schools and run them all under workers’ control. Only a worker’s government will be able to force these changes!

A Washington Post article on June 8, 2021, by Todd Frankel and Douglas MacMillian, entitled “IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth.” The authors argue, according to information provided by ProPublica, that Bezos filed a tax return in 2011 reporting he lost money because of bad investments, allowing him to claim and receive a $4,000 tax credit for his children. And as despicable as this is, all the capitalists engage in the same behavior. In 2018, in the middle of the worst health and economic crisis in the US since the 1930s, Trump gave his friends $1 trillion dollars while the American working class died in incredible numbers.

Over 600,000 people across the country and over 50,000 in NY alone, died of Covid, and yet, while the pandemic persists and people continue to die of a more virulent strain of covid, the mayor of NYC, along with his supporters in the trade unions just privatized the health care of 250,000 NYC retirees.

The promise to all workers who retire that the government made since 1965 regarding Medicare, will now no longer exist as we have come to understand it, now private companies will be administering our health care and we all know what that means, higher premiums, fewer doctors, etc. This is happening because the city is trying to fill a $600 million budget gap yearly, and instead of the rich paying higher taxes, the retirees, among the most vulnerable section of the working class, will be forced to pay for the raises for everyone who has managed to retain his/her job.

All of this was done behind the backs of the workers, not surprisingly. While the union tops had been negotiating this deal since 2018, we only managed to find out about it a few months ago leaving little time to organize against it.

What happens Next? The workers who remain on the job will have to face the same diminution of their health care and since NY’s benefits are generally much more generous than in many parts of the country, what happens here, generally happens to workers everywhere.

The crisis in the economy reverberates throughout the entire social fabric of the country. Hundreds of thousands of poorly paid essential workers who are, in the main, Black and Brown, have been forced to work through the pandemic, while the wealthy
continue to reap their very lucrative rewards. This is no less true for the insurance companies which will be raising premiums and denying services to workers who will continue to need them. In fact, Karen Ignagni, president, and CEO of EmblemHealth, one of the companies which is now slated to administer Medicare Advantage for 250,00 retirees, earns $3,095,534 yearly; it is unlikely that she is earning this by providing services to her clients, and yet this is one of the two companies that has been chosen to replace Medicare in NY.

It is incredible that all over the industrialized world, even including small under-industrialized countries like Costa Rica and especially Cuba, which has suffered under a strangling embargo enforced by the US government for 59 years, can provide free health care for all! In the US, while millions have gone uninsured, the largest increase in credit card debt is among people who have health insurance.

A strong leadership would unite all union workers and organize the unorganized but the bureaucrats have not mounted a united fight against the attacks, leaving us divided and seemingly weak. They have served the bosses well. The bureaucrats claim that the only thing that can save working people is accepting cuts now so that they will not be too draconian later.
That strategy has never been proven to be true, our conditions as workers have been undermined time and again since our “leaders” continue to manage the austerity of the City, State and Federal governments and so while the rich continue to earn billions, the working class continues to suffer a severe loss of pay and the degradation of our working conditions. Jobs that were once full-time jobs have now become part time and often disappear altogether leaving those who are working to pick up the slack.

Many of these jobs neither come with benefits or enough money to pay for individual healthcare plans. Many workers do without any healthcare at all. The bureaucrats promise that if we support the Democrats, they will come through for us and yet, once again, this has proven to be a lie. The national rally today is not being endorsed by any of the unions, even the nurses’ union.

At the DNC, Randi Weingarten, the President of the AFT voted against endorsing single payer. Moreover, Schumer, a state senator from NY with the help of Weingarten, just siphoned off 3 billion dollars from public schools to give to charters.

Moreover, as of August 31,st the federal rent moratorium will end, throwing hundreds of thousands out of their homes across the country. The combination of the covid uptick and homelessness, will create a severe crisis that only massive working-class mobilizations and strike actions can begin to address let alone solve and as the crisis widens, and more workers, who thought that they were safe, and that the economic crisis was someone else’s problem, are beginning to become angry because of unkept promises.

We are now facing the real possibility of a severe economic collapse putting more workers out of our homes and into the streets. The moratorium on rent will be up soon, jeopardizing the living conditions of millions and yet, the people who are supposed to be defending our interests, that is the trade union leaders, are defending the interests of our bosses; they serve them.

We must cease to put our faith in these handmaidens of the capitalists and begin to rely on our own strength. We need to mobilize the masses of workers to say no to this sellout and we need to build a labor party based on a program that will defend the interests of workers, not the bosses.

• Free Quality Health Care For All! For Working Class management of the entire industry!
• Nationalize the health care, insurance, big pharma and bio-tech industry without indemnification!
• Build Class Struggle Caucuses in the unions to take back our unions
• For Class Struggle mass actions and strikes. For Working Class Political Independence
• For an independent democratic Labor Party that establishes a Workers Government!
United Front Committee for Labor Party, UFCLP
(Email: committee for laborparty [at] gmail.com) Facebook/Twitter:For a Masslabor Party in the USA@mass labor partyusa
WordPress: https//foramasslaborprty.wordpress.com
07/22/2021
by Bye, Bye Democrats
In addition to all of the above, Biden, Feinstein, Manuchin, et al promote the filibuster, ending all possibility of any progressive change, from ending election rigging to promoting union organizing to passing the long overdue infrastructure bill. The latest is that the infrastructure bill is on "life support," near death. See https://www.huffpost.com/entry/infrastructure-senate-bill_n_60fecd20e4b0d017f8371f76, 7/26/21.

It is always true that the party in power loses seats in Congress in the midterm congressional elections. The Democrats are clearly on the road to lose the 2022 elections in both houses of congress and the 2024 presidential election of the filibuster is allowed to exist.

The Democrats and Republicans are always bipartisan in support of the war machine, and it is clear that Biden and friends want that kind of bipartisan cooperation. The Democrats totally despise most of the people who voted for Biden.

By the Democrats' own admission, the poverty is still immense. See https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coronavirus-outbreak-unemployment-benefits_n_60f02dc1e4b0a771e8019a3b
7/15/21

"Even so, the United States remains about 6.8 million jobs short of the number it had in February 2020, just before the virus erupted across the country and paralyzed the economy."

"And weekly applications for unemployment benefits remain high by historical standards: Just before the pandemic, they amounted to about 220,000 a week. All told, 13.8 million Americans were receiving some type of unemployment aid during the week of June 26, down from 30.6 million a year earlier."

From http://www.shadowstats.com/, 6/20/21,
"There Is No V-Shaped Recovery • Battered, Non-Recovered May 2021 Payrolls and Unemployment Confirmed a Still-Ravaged Economy on Par With the Great Depression "

At http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts, real unemployment is 25.8%, same as the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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