The proposals pick up where initiatives by the administration of William Clinton left off. In his 1992 presidential election campaign, the Democratic Party candidate pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” He kept that promise by signing the welfare “reform” bill four years later, the first attack on the Social Security Act since World War II. Millions of working people have had that safety net taken away since Aid for Families with Dependent Children was gutted.

Like the attack on welfare, the new push to chip away at Medicare as a social entitlement has enjoyed bipartisan support from the beginning. Leading liberal Edward Kennedy is a key sponsor of the Senate bill, while President George Bush has endorsed both versions of the legislation, saying they are consistent with his own proposals of a year earlier.

In effect, these capitalist politicians are driving toward privatizing health care for retirees. The attack is hidden under the guise of allegedly meeting the need for including prescription drugs in Medicare. The heart of the changes, however, is not additional coverage of some medication expenses, but carrot-and-stick proposals—including stepped-up means testing—aimed at nudging people off government-provided Medicare and into the arms of for-profit “health-care providers.” If they wanted to expand Medicare, as some capitalists politicians claim, there’s a simple way: include prescription drugs free of charge in the existing government-guaranteed program.

The various proposals on the table will result in millions of working people 65 and older—many on fixed incomes—being forced to dig even deeper into their own pockets to pay higher deductibles and co-payments. It will also deepen the disproportionate impact on the health of Blacks and other oppressed nationalities.

To justify such proposals, Democratic and Republican politicians and media pundits argue that Medicare is being strained to the breaking point. Costs are much higher than originally expected, they say, because people are living longer on average. Looking at the fact that people live longer today as a problem is a blatant sign of the dog-eat-dog reality and morality of capitalism.

There is a direct connection between the assault on social entitlements and broader attacks on labor. As working people face fewer possibilities of getting jobs and holding them, the capitalists’ attacks on social welfare programs take a bigger toll. The more Medicare is weakened, the more workers’ compensation is eroded, the less often unemployment benefits get extended, the larger the proportion of medical bills workers and their families must cover without government programs—the less confident we are. The more likely we are to rush right back out, begin looking for work, and take a job for one, two, three, four dollars an hour less.

Workers have a different class view, a different moral view of society. Elementary human solidarity is in our interests, not in conflict with them. We cannot make ourselves think of other human beings as though they do not, or should not, exist after the age of 65.

To the political vanguard of the working class, Social Security has always been about the battle to bring all welfare payments, all medical claims, all supplemental payments for education and child care into a comprehensive, nationwide, government-guaranteed entitlement. That is why the term “social wage” is useful. It describes something that goes beyond the wage any individual worker receives from an employer. It denotes what the working class and labor movement fight to establish as social rights for all. It is something that ties our class together.

But for the capitalists, Social Security was about making the smallest concessions necessary. It was about looking at actuarial tables to ensure that payments would never take much out of their potential profits or reduce their power over a divided and insecure working class. That’s how the exploiters still look at it.

For those who toil for a living there is no meaningful medical-care program, or any other social entitlement, that is not free of charge, for a lifetime, and for all.  
 
 
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