CHICAGO, October 26 — With almost 50 million uninsured, and racist unemployment at a 60-year high, Cook County Health Services CEO Foley and the new System Board, are slashing services and cutting jobs at a breath-taking pace. There are over 1 million uninsured workers in Cook County and with plant closings and layoffs the number grows every day. These cuts are racist to the core as 82% of the patients are black or immigrant workers.

The new strategic plan calls for closing in-patient services at Provident and Oak Forest hospitals, including the Provident OB service. They are cutting staff at Stroger and issuing a blizzard of memos and write-ups to make workers fear for their jobs. They want to make every patient pay $10 at every clinic visit, even if they can’t afford bus fare.

The Cook County Clinic in Robbins is being sold to the Christian Health System, a private for-profit outfit that charges for care on a sliding scale. If you are one of the thousands of unemployed or uninsured workers in the south suburbs, this leaves you without a doctor or without that $40 you were planning to use to put gas in the car. That’s the racist profit system; you have freedom to choose, health care or gas, food or medicine, a CT scan or next month’s rent.

Staffing in some units is being cut drastically. In the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) nursing bosses Antoinette Williams and Zina Jones plan to use 40% fewer nurses for the same number of babies. Not only is this a threat to those we serve, but nurses, doctors, techs and other workers will get fired and  disciplined when mistakes inevitably occur. Nobody will write up the bosses making the cuts.

Cook County patients and health workers have two problems: racist health care cuts and capitalism. The “free-market,” organized around profits, has made public health care an endangered species. Regardless of political party, the  President, Congress, Governor, mayor and health board must all serve profit needs rather than workers’ needs. Capitalism’s poverty, stress
unemployment, pollution and wars cause the health problems. The only solution is communist revolution and a worker-run system, where racism and profits are outlawed and meeting the needs of the working class comes first.

This is deliberate, premeditated understaffing, ordered by the same CEO and Board that the medical staff and unions hailed as the “savior of the system.” Maximum work from the minimum number of workers is the standard operating procedure under capitalism. This is doubly true during an economic crisis and two wars (despite the “Peace Prize” president). In a hospital, especially in an intensive care unit, this amounts to cold-blooded, racist murder.

Health workers and professionals must join forces with those we serve, who are the main victims of these attacks, to fight these viscious, racist cuts. We should begin by protesting at town hall meetings, organizing job actions and preparing for a strike to fight these attacks every way we can.