[lbo-talk] re: a Delphi worker on Delphi

[Gar Lipow]

On 11/3/05, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Gar Lipow wrote:
> >
> > So single payer
> > health would be better for workers even if financed  100%  via
> > regressive taxes , not only collectively but individually in the
> > majority of cases. That is most currently insured   USAians would be
> > better off under a regressively financed single payer plan than  under
> > the current system. True?
>
> At one point (perhaps) -- say during the administrations of Truman &
> Eisenhower, or (though were verging here on the matter of if pigs had
> wings) even the first Clinton Administration -- this discussion of what
> would be "best" for workers would have been a rational discussion. But
> now we have to start not with wankery on the technicalities but rather
> with a focus on the immense political power of the insurance and
> pharmceutical companies. (The power of the medical profession is less
> relevant, as more and more physicians are being clearly
> 'proletarianized.') Given that power, the circumstances under which even
> the weakest national health program would become politically possible
> would _also_ be the conditions under which it would be silly -- in fact
> traitorous -- to stop with anything else than a complete nationalization
> of health care. That is, the power to impose a weak single-payer program
> on the insurance industry would be the power to socialize health care,
> period.

No. Because we are nowhere near the ability to win something like this
nationally. But we might win single payer health in one state - where
we do NOT have the power to nationalize health care.  So in the
context of state initiatives it is not "traitorous" to discuss less
than full nationalization of health care.   The forces of reaction
have us so stymied at the national level that state and local level
fights are the only place leftist may be able to  go on the offensive,
rather than merely taking defensive action.