Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers

The ridiculously named grouplet Socialist Resurgence (SR) is publishing its founding documents, among which is a political report entitled U.S. faces political, social, and economic crisis (pdf). Numbering at most 50 members, the new organization is compelled to issue mighty proclamations on the state of modern politics. The resulting document is incoherent.

Of course our comrades are not explicitly demanding steep wage cuts for healthcare workers. They'd definitely deny it if you asked them. Indeed, they write

Healthcare workers are under siege by employers. Hospitals and clinics are cutting wages and benefits while nurses and doctors are forced to see more patients, despite evidence that doing so increases errors with disastrous effects. Experienced nurses and doctors are being fired and replaced by fresh out of school nurses and doctors-they're paid less. Experienced staff not fired are leaving the profession due to ever increasing on the job stress. Suicide rates of nurses and doctors are on the rise.

The solution to this sorry state of affairs is this (emphasis mine).

Health care is a human right. This must include dental, vision care, and humane, non-punitive, and non-stigmatizing approaches to mental health care. No one should have to go bankrupt because of medical costs or decide whether one eats or gets medicine. Get the insurance companies out of the equation. Free quality universal public health care now!

Even our Trotskyist friends are smart enough to know that nothing is "free"--everything has to be paid for somehow. Their conceit is that the disempowered bourgeoisie will foot the bill from all the huge profits they've stashed in some vault somewhere, accumulated over decades from the ruthless exploitation of the working class.

And that will work for a year, or maybe two, or at most ten. But eventually the 1% will be entirely dispossessed and no longer able to pay up. Then the cash has to come from someplace else. "Free" healthcare means that patients can't be charged, so the only other possible sources of money are either taxpayers or employees.

So it is instructive that the political report cites Cuba as a positive example for how healthcare should be funded. The bourgeoisie were eliminated 60 years ago, and any residual wealth they left behind has long since been squandered. So Cuba illustrates what happens when the piggy bank runs dry.

They write:

In Cuba, the healthcare system is publicly owned with several layers. There are community clinics, with doctor-nurse teams who live in the neighborhoods that they serve, local hospitals, and larger medical institutes. All healthcare is free, with some exceptions for some medicines and procedures for higher income people, and quality of life indices are impressive. Cuba enjoys one of the highest life expectancy rates in the hemisphere, with the average life expectancy at 78.05 years old, compared to the U.S. at 78.62 years. In 2005, Cuba had 627 doctors and 94 dentists per 100,000 population. That same year, there were 225 physicians and 54 dentists per 100,000 population in the U.S. All medical and nursing education in Cuba is free. Cuba has innovated in the realm of vaccines and cancer treatment. Unlike the U.S., which sends weapons around the world, Cuba sends doctors and nurses to disaster areas and semi-colonial countries.

One can certainly dispute the virtues of Cuban healthcare. Cubans have always had a long life expectancy since way back when--a trait that's likely more genetic than the result of good healthcare. Regards vaccines, all they've done (to their credit) is manufacture them--unhindered as they are by the liability faced by American firms. I'm unaware of any pathbreaking cancer research coming from Cuba. Medical research today is overwhelmingly done in the United States (which is one reason why drugs are more expensive here).

Those issues aside--the question is Who pays for healthcare for Cubans? The answer is obvious: the employees. According to Fox News, in 2014 Cuban doctors got a 150% pay raise--all the way to $67/month! Nurses also made out like bandits, with their monthly paycheck going from $13 to $25.

A homeless woman in any civilized country earns more than that just by panhandling. Our comrades will argue that Cubans are often compensated in kind rather than in cash, e.g., with "free" housing and a food ration card. Which is just like in the US: the bag lady gets to sleep for free in a shelter and is given a free meal (along with food stamps).

Life is much harder for US doctors, who have to pay their own rent and buy their own food. But they earn on average about $17,000/month, or a bit over 250 times what the Cuban medic makes. The median US salary for registered nurses in the US is about $6,000/month.

Healthcare is a labor-intensive business. While I have not been able to find a precise statistic, if it mirrors the economy as a whole 70% of costs are paid to labor. So obviously, if you want to reduce the cost of healthcare in America to be something close to "free", you will have to dramatically lower the wages of healthcare workers. The comrades never say that, but of course that's exactly what they mean. They think doctors and nurses, and phlebotomists and radiation technicians, and orderlies and laundry workers, should all take a whopping big pay cut--just so we can believe the fiction that healthcare is "free."

So I'll stand by my headline: a 100% accurate summary of Socialist Resurgence's true position. Socialist Resurgence demands steep wage cuts for healthcare workers.

The rest of the political report is not full of facts as much as factoids. The difference is context, and in every case our comrades leave that out. A few examples:

• They mention that despite low unemployment, labor participation has not budged. True, but it's due mostly to the on-going retirement of baby boomers, who are withdrawing from the labor force.
• They predict a new recession is looming. Of course they're right--eventually there will be a recession. The business cycle has not been repealed (except in places like Cuba which are in permanent recession). But it looks increasingly unlikely to happen in 2020.
• They write "the free speech rights of students and professors has come under attack. Critics of Israeli apartheid and advocates for BDS have been attacked as anti-Semitic by pro-Israel politicians and lobbying groups." Accusing somebody of antisemitism is not the same as denying their free speech rights. The campus Left's insistence on shouting down pro-Israel speakers is a much better example.
• "Living standards for U.S. workers are falling." This is manifestly not true.

But here is the biggest howler:

The wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80% own 7%. Eight people, six from the U.S., own as much wealth as half of humanity. Only the top 20% fully recovered from the Great Recession.

Do eight people buy half the cars in the world? Do eight people eat half of the world's food? Do eight people own half of the world's houses? Do six Americans receive half of all social security payments? Of course not! It is only by the narrowest, cherry-picked definition of "wealth" that our comrades can make such ludicrous claims.

This is one of those documents I've read so that you don't have to. Not recommended.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Socialist Action Goes AWOL