{"id":56327,"date":"2013-08-06T14:56:46","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T13:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/when-direct-action-gets-the-goods\/56327\/"},"modified":"2013-08-06T14:56:46","modified_gmt":"2013-08-06T13:56:46","slug":"when-direct-action-gets-the-goods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/when-direct-action-gets-the-goods\/","title":{"rendered":"When Direct Action Gets the Goods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n

The muzak track on Northwestern Memorial Hospital\u2019s main phone line boosts the health care behemoth\u2019s\u00a0transplant program<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 including \u201cone of the largest living donor kidney transplant programs in the country.\u201d But those services \u2014 which include one of the only liver transplant programs in the region \u2014 might as well be on another planet for the undocumented and uninsured.<\/p>\n

This weekend, more than a dozen critically ill\u00a0undocumented immigrants<\/a>\u00a0in need of organ transplants\u00a0struck back<\/a>, taking a\u00a0six-day-old hunger strike<\/a>\u00a0to the\u00a0doors<\/a>\u00a0of one of the nation\u2019s wealthiest healthcare non-profits to\u00a0demand a meeting<\/a>\u00a0with Northwestern Memorial CEO Dean Harrison. Harrison, who earned almost\u00a0$10 million<\/a>\u00a0in 2010, heads up a system of hospitals, clinics and medical practices \u2014 including flagship facility Northwestern Memorial Hospital \u2014 earned\u00a0$1.7 billion<\/a>\u00a0last year.<\/p>\n

The ultimatum Northwestern faced from the\u00a0protesters<\/a>\u00a0was simple: We will not leave \u2013 we are fighting for our lives.<\/p>\n

On Monday evening, after an avalanche of terrible press that humanized the dire trick bag that undocumented people in need of transplants confront in Chicago, and with no end in sight to the encampment of sick people outside their doors, Northwestern blinked.\u00a0Hospital officials announced that undocumented patients will be added to their transplant list. Organizers and patients have vowed to return if Northwestern reneges.<\/p>\n

Northwestern has drawn a barrage of criticism over the years for failing to put the \u2018non\u2019 in non-profit. The system\u2019s new women\u2019s hospital briefly lost its non-profit exemption from the State of Illinois in 2011 for\u00a0spending less than 2%<\/a>\u00a0of its vast revenue on free care for poor people. But Northwestern is hardly the only tax-exempt non-profit hospital to fail to include the\u00a0poor<\/a>\u00a0in their idea of charity \u2014 in 1996, a 15-month Senate review found that nonprofit hospitals routinely overcharge or deny care to the poorest patients in their orbit.<\/p>\n

And Northwestern has tendered a huge caveat in its offer to the hunger strikers: prospective transplant patients, regardless of immigration status, still need to show they can pony up the money for anti-rejection drugs in the wake of a transplant. Those medications can cost $20,000 a year or more \u2014 less than a third of what dialysis costs \u2014 and with the undocumented denied the option of coverage under Obamacare, these patients could very well be compelled to pay those costs out of pocket.<\/p>\n

The dilemma of the hunger strikers underscores one of the larger\u00a0lunacies<\/a>\u00a0in the U.S. healthcare system: the federal government will pay for a lifetime of dialysis for a person without papers, at a cost of $75,000 a year, but will not fund a $100,000 transplant that would make that dialysis unnecessary.<\/p>\n

The real flashpoint here is, of course, class. If you\u2019re working class, as most of these immigrants \u2014 and increasingly, most of the rest of us \u2014 are, the prevailing system of transplant protocols and the larger national dynamics around immigration and health care policy are pretty much guaranteed to screw you.<\/p>\n

Undocumented and uninsured patients seeking medical care will find no relief in Obamacare, which bails out the health care industrial complex while\u00a0barring<\/a>\u00a0the undocumented from accessing the insurance company\u00a0bailout<\/a>\u00a0scheme. Nor will these sick people find any relief in current versions of immigration \u2018reform\u2019 legislation, which accommodate companies who seek access to \u2018documented\u2019\u00a0high-tech workers<\/a>\u00a0but leave millions of people currently without papers with a difficult and uncertain path to\u00a0legal status<\/a>\u00a0in the United States.<\/p>\n

One in five organs used in U.S. transplant programs like Northwestern\u2019s come from\u00a0uninsured people<\/a>, while barely 1% of those organs go to uninsured people who need them.People without documents<\/a>\u00a0are estimated conservatively to donate organs at more than three times the rate they receive them. And for people without documents, even having health insurance is\u00a0no guarantee<\/a>\u00a0that you\u2019ll get a lifesaving transplant if you lack legal standing as an immigrant. Those kinds of inequities are A-OK with anti-immigrant legislators like U.S. Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher of California, who has said of immigrants, \u201cIf they\u2019re dead, I don\u2019t have an objection to their organs being used. If they\u2019re alive, they shouldn\u2019t be here no matter what.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama apologists will be tempted to jump on Rohrabacher\u2019s repulsive remarks to blame Republicans for the challenges that poor people, including immigrants without documents, confront in the nation\u2019s healthcare system. But that\u2019s bullcrap. Recall that Obama moved last year to enshrine this country\u2019s miserable treatment of undocumented youth as official policy with his \u201cDream Act<\/a>\u201d executive order, which lets youth without papers fight and die in this nation\u2019s imperial wars or take on the increasingly enormous economic burden of higher education in exchange for a\u00a0two-year deferment to deportation<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 but denies them or their family members a clear path to legal status. Meanwhile, Republicans are actively floating a scheme to directly trade legal status for\u00a0military service<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a scheme that at least some Democrats can be expected to embrace.<\/p>\n

The hunger strikers and their supporters, who range from local minister\u00a0Jose Landaverde<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Moratorium on Deportations Campaign<\/a>\u00a0to the\u00a0press crew<\/a>\u00a0that grew out of Occupy Chicago, have more than Northwestern in their sites. The University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System, Rush University Medical Center and Advocate Christ Medical Center are among their tick list of local non-profit health care institutions who need to pony up what their civic missions all purport to support: health care for those who need it. But until labor is afforded the same freedom to cross borders as capital, and until health care is treated as a right instead of a privilege for the wealthy few, the health and wellbeing of these poor workers and their families remain at grave risk.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the poor, critically ill immigrants in Chicago who staged the hunger strike at Northwestern have embraced one salient historical truth and one path forward: direct action gets the goods \u2014 and they will step up that direct action until they win the right to survive and thrive or die trying. Volunteers with the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign\u00a0put it this way<\/a>: \u201cThis is a struggle to confront two racist and unjust systems that are intimately connected: immigration policy and health care \u2014 this is a struggle for life, in the face of a politics of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chris Geovanis<\/strong> is a member of the\u00a0HammerHard MediaWorks<\/a>\u00a0collective. She can be reached at\u00a0chrisgeovanis@gmail.com<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n

More information about the hunger strikers can be found here:\u00a0<\/i>www.tinyurl.com\/strike4care<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0www.tinyurl.com\/strike4health<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0www.moratoriumondeportations.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Republished from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chicago. The muzak track on Northwestern Memorial Hospital\u2019s main phone line boosts the health care behemoth\u2019s\u00a0transplant program\u00a0\u2014 including \u201cone of the largest living donor kidney transplant programs in the country.\u201d But those services \u2014 which include one of the only liver transplant programs in the region \u2014 might as well be on another planet for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-56327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}