The bipartisan drive through the 1990s against Social Security benefits, which President George Bush seeks to accelerate, means that for millions of working people who are supposed to be covered by Medicare and Medicaid it is more and more difficult to even find a doctor willing to treat them.

And the cold-blooded decision by "health maintenance" organizations to drop more than 2 million elderly from their rolls--in effect eliminating their prescription coverage that so many joined to receive in the first place--shows the inhuman character of the capitalist health-care system.

The rulers, however, are meeting resistance to their bipartisan drive to slash the social wage. Across the country a feature of strikes by union members is defending meager health plans. Coal miners and others in mining regions have mobilized over the past two years to demand the government meet its obligations to provide health care, retirement, and black lung benefits. The widows' walk currently under way is the latest chapter in this fight. These struggles help point the way forward by posing the right to health care as a social question essential to defending the lives and living standard of working people.

For the working class, there is no real social security that does not cover the entire lifetime of a worker. Similarly, there is no real education that is not lifetime education.

The capitalist rulers seek to impose on individual families the responsibility for social services. But the fight for social security is a fight for the lifetime right to medical care, to workers' compensation and disability payments if you are injured, to unemployment insurance for as long as needed, as well as funds to cover education expenses and child care. And these funds should be not just defended at their current levels but greatly expanded to meet the needs of working people.

The labor movement needs to lead the fight for a cradle-to-grave nationwide, government-guaranteed entitlement program as a social right for all.

Such a fight can push aside the practice, that has grown up with the agreement of the labor officialdom over the past decades, of tying health-care plans to the profitability of individual employers. In good times, such a plan seemed to be working for those who qualified for these benefits. But as companies like Enron and a growing number of others go under, workers find their promised company benefits are no longer there and they once again find themselves up against the full ravages of the capitalist dog-eat-dog system. The steel trusts are seeking to get out of their contractual obligations to health and retirement benefits for 600,000 workers, the latest example of the trap this setup leads union members into.

What's involved in the assault on the social wage is not primarily an economic crisis but a great political and moral crisis. The capitalist rulers have neither the class interest or desire to raise humanity up on new foundations.

Only the working class has a chance to resolve this growing crisis by leading a fight to transform society in a truly human way. The working people of Cuba, just 90 miles off the U.S. shores have shown that all this is possible. By making a socialist revolution even in a relatively poor and underdeveloped country--and defending it over the past 40 years--workers and farmers of that country have demonstrated what can be done when health care, education, and care of the young, elderly, and disabled are prioritized as universal human rights for all.  
 
 
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