Liberal critics of the bill point out the obvious: owners of insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical monopolies, and other profit-hungry health-care businesses will be major beneficiaries of this law. But they don’t challenge the heart of this attack, which is an effort by the employer class to tear apart social solidarity and reinforce divisions among working people.

Medicare, won in 1965 as a byproduct of the mass Black rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, was along with Medicaid an extension of the Social Security gains wrested from the U.S. rulers by the labor battles in the 1930s. The capitalist politicians who enacted Medicare sought to make the smallest possible concessions, falling far short of making health care a universal entitlement.

Promoters of the Medicare “reform” bill claim it will expand coverage to include prescription drugs—not included in the original program. But virtually every provision in the new bill is designed to shift the burden for health care more onto working people and to reinforce the approach of individuals fending for themselves.

In the name of offering prescription drug coverage, the new law will force many Medicare recipients to rely more heavily on private health-care companies. It will introduce means-testing, tying premiums to income levels. Many working people will face big premiums, out-of-pocket costs, and deductibles. The bill will also push Medicare recipients toward depending on individual “health savings accounts.”

Some pro-Democratic critics of the bill blame it on Bush and the Republicans. But the measure was adopted by a bipartisan congressional vote. Sen. Edward Kennedy was instrumental in lining up Democratic support for Medicare “reform,” bailing out only at the last minute over objections to a couple of provisions.

The assault on Medicare is part of the overall war by the employer class on working people. The bosses are compelled to wage this offensive in order to turn around the long-term decline of their profit rates, which has led to a worldwide economic crisis for them. It’s for the same reason they are forced to cut jobs, drive down wages, speed up production, and roll back social benefits at home, as well as fight to edge out capitalist competitors and launch imperialist wars abroad.

Because Medicare and Social Security were won by working people in struggle, the government can’t simply repeal these programs, viewed by millions as an elementary right. So the opening wedge of this offensive was the dismantling of welfare in 1996 by President William Clinton when he signed the cynically named Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

The gutting of the Aid for Families with Dependent Children was the prelude to a broader attack. The rulers first targeted a vulnerable section of our class—single women with children among impoverished layers of the working class. They sought to pit these unemployed workers against those with jobs, portraying the former as freeloading “welfare queens” leeching off the hardworking citizens.

Similarly, the employers argue for Medicare “reform” and “cost reduction” by issuing dire warnings that the program will become bankrupt in the coming years—and it’s all the fault of the “baby boomers,” the generation of working people who are entering retirement age today. They try to convince us that the conditions faced by the elderly are not the problem of the middle-aged or the young. In reality, the capitalists don’t care about the first 13 years of workers’ lives; then they care about our ability to work hard for the next 50; then they hope we die quickly. That coarse attitude—“Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”—is what the superwealthy try to get working people to accept.

In contrast, class-conscious workers not only oppose the current attacks on Medicare. They argue that working people, whose labor produces all wealth, have a right to lifetime medical care. The labor movement needs to fight to bring all medical and disability claims, retirement pensions, and welfare payments into a single, nationwide, government-guaranteed entitlement—as a social right for all.
 
 
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Medicare bill shifts more costs of health care onto retirees  
 
 
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