Health care and the fight for socialism
24 June 2017
The Senate Republicans’ bill to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, unveiled on Thursday and set for a vote next week, comes on the heels of last month’s passage of a similar measure in the House of Representatives. These two bills are a milestone in the decades-long drive by the American ruling class to eviscerate the bedrock social reforms of the 1930s and 1960s.
The central feature of both versions is the imposition of more than $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor and disabled, effectively ending its status as a guaranteed benefit program. The ultimate enactment of this class war legislation, whatever its precise form, will be the prelude to the privatization and dismantling of Medicare, the government insurance program for the elderly, and Social Security, the government pension system enacted at the height of the Depression in the 1930s.
Both the House and Senate bills cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy by more than $700 billion, eliminate requirements on businesses to provide health insurance for their employees, and allow states to exempt insurance firms from having to provide essential benefits such as doctors’ services, inpatient and outpatient hospital care, ambulance service, prescription drug coverage, pregnancy and childbirth care and mental health and substance abuse services.
What is involved here is a social counterrevolution. It has been underway for more than four decades, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations. It was accelerated under the Obama administration following the Wall Street crash of 2008. With the coming to power of Donald Trump, the billionaire personification of the American financial oligarchy, it is being…