PHOTO/SANDY PERRY
SAN JOSE, CA — Six Daughters of Charity Hospitals in California were poised for sale to a for-profit chain, Prime Healthcare, but the sale fell through in March. The State’s Attorney General had conditionally approved the sale, requiring the buyer to continue providing the same level of charity and MediCal (California’s Medicaid) services for at least 10 years. Prime Healthcare declined those conditions.
Federal healthcare reform, cuts in insurance reimbursements, and general uncertainty in the economy combined to make it harder for the nonprofit Daughters of Charity to continue. At this point they face bankruptcy, which will also endanger patient care for poor people as well as worker rights and pensions.
It is shameful when a charitable organization has to sell—or go down, when so many will suffer. Daughters of Charity has been providing care for the poor in California since the 1800s. They never turned anyone away, including the migrant farmworkers who have long provided food for the country in California’s fruit and vegetable basket.
A pattern of such situations happening across the country proves that the ACA, known as Obamacare, was never meant to provide universal health care. For example, undocumented and some newly documented immigrants are denied care under federal healthcare reform. It was designed from the beginning to benefit the private insurance industry through mandating purchase and subsidizing it with public funds—and that is exactly what is happening. According to Forbe’s 400 billionaires list for 2013, the richest people in America are getting richer, and 14 of the richest are in the health business—pharmaceuticals, hospitals, health information technology, drug distribution, medical equipment and supplies, etc.
In a monumental bait and switch, Medicaid, underfunded from its beginning, was expanded to cover people making 138 percent of poverty. To expand it as a major piece of the ACA was a set-up for failure. Immediately, the Supreme Court allowed 21 Southern states to opt out. And, many states had not participated in Medicaid fully before, including California, which still refuses to restore years of cuts.
Not surprisingly, the ACA has had a rocky start here. A lawsuit was filed because hundreds of thousands of applicants and their applications were floundering in our understaffed county offices for months. Two and one-half percent more workers than expected appeared to apply for MediCal. After all of that, a MediCal card does not guarantee that we will find coverage. Because of California’s historically low reimbursement rates, most private doctors stopped seeing MediCal patients long ago, and the non-profit community clinics are understaffed and face a federal funding cliff in 2016.
What we must continue to fight for is nationalized health care. Healthcare is one of our most basic human rights. It comes down to the right to live. State sanctioned denial of healthcare, not treating large swaths of people as human, while siphoning off federal funds to corporations, is the beginning of fascism.
Please call about upcoming “Taking Back our Health” People’s Movement Assemblies to San José Low-Income Self-Help Center, (408) 977-1275, and help build toward the 3rd US Social Forum in San José in June. www.ussocialforum.net
