The Donald Trump administration’s move to replace Obamacare is a move to replace a severely weakened and inadequate healthcare system with an even worse one. The inability of the wealthiest country in the history of capitalism to provide healthcare for the working class exposes that healthcare for profit is incompatible with providing for the needs of the working class.
Healthcare, A Profit Industry
Health insurance cannot be both comprehensive and profitable. The health insurance companies make money by signing up young healthy people to buy policies, while limiting the costs they spend on care for the sick who require more services. This formula has been extremely profitable. United Health, one of the five largest insurers in the country, announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare plans because they made less money than anticipated. Their profits for the year were “only” $11 billion, record breaking, but $850 million less than expected, with the bulk of the difference coming from losses associated with policies linked to the Obamacare plans. (Consumer Affairs, 11/1 2016).
If a company making that much profit won’t provide care to people, it is futile to expect health insurers to provide comprehensive healthcare to the working class.
Healthcare Was a Hard Fought Gain
A system of employer-paid health coverage emerged in the U.S. out of mass struggles. As the working class fought to build unions, healthcare became part of the struggle. Union membership in the U.S. reached its peak in 1954 with about 35 percent of the workforce unionized. In the late 1950s and into the 60s, the ruling class attacked the unions, mainly using anti-communist McCarthyism to divide and terrorize workers.
The trend to de-unionize the workforce was accelerated under Carter and then Reagan to the point where now only about 10 percent of the U.S. working class is unionized (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1/26).
Ruling Class Smash Unions and Healthcare
The percent of people having health insurance rose and fell in an almost identical way as the rate of unionization. Health coverage reached a peak of about 80 percent in 1968. It remained stable until 1980 when it began a steady drop. What was needed was a plan to provide bare-bones coverage and place the cost on the backs of the working class. An imperialist power needs its part of its population to receive enough healthcare to fight wars. That’s when Obamacare came in.
A combination of moving more people onto Medicaid and forcing young healthy people to buy expensive insurance with high deductibles increased the amount of people with insurance. This year, the average cost of the Obamacare Bronze plan (the cheapest) is $311/month for an individual 30 year old. The plan includes over $6000/year in deductible or out of pocket costs. Which means if you are sick, you will be paying thousands more on top of your premiums (Healthpocket.com 10/26/2016). This high cost, low coverage health insurance is nothing like the virtually free coverage unionized workers fought for at the height of the union movement. Obamacare was part of the thrust of reversing social gains won by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle. This is indicative of how important it is to build a mass fighting movement against capitalism, and to build a society based on need and commitment rather than money and exploitation.
Further Decay
As expensive as Obamacare is, it is scheduled to get worse next year with increases in premiums and more out-of-pocket costs. But the deterioration of healthcare under the Obamacare plan is not fast enough for some members of the ruling class.
The United States empire is weaker than at any time since World War II. Healthcare is one arena of struggle that reflects this weakness. The Trump administration is now fronting for the insurance companies and the faction of bosses who want to attack the working class even faster. The new healthcare bill “would eliminate the mandate for most [people] in favor of a new system of tax credits to induce people to buy insurance on the open market. It would also eventually roll back the expansion of Medicaid that has provided coverage to more than 10 million people in 31 states” (NY Times, 3/7). Medicaid serves the poorest section of the U.S. working-class children and parents, as well as many older and disabled workers.
The race to the bottom in healthcare coverage is a symptom of a profit system that cannot provide livable existence for the working class.

MARYLAND, March 21—As the city council in Prince George’s County, was debating whether to be a sanctuary city, some neighbors organized a rally and marched to the public hearing to support Sanctuary City status. Some council members seemed to be for it, but many residents were fearful. We need to organize to dispel these fears by building a strong, grassroots network to support those threatened with deportation. Just voting for symbolic sanctuary status is not enough.
Speaking at that hearing, a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) emphasized the racist nature of deportations and how racism should not be allowed within the city. Our next step was a public outreach rally. Seven neighbors set up a table and talked to shoppers outside a local working class grocery store. The group was multiracial with signs in Spanish and English and speakers included white, Latin, and Black neighbors. Within the hour we made 25 contacts. We planned a potluck dinner on April 1st and another outreach later in April. During the rally we received no negative or racist comments, though some shoppers expressed fear because of their immigration status. The event increased our confidence in the working class.
In follow up conversations, the PL’er has stressed that a Sanctuary City ordinance won’t keep residents safe. Grassroots working class organizing and unity, on the other hand, can defend our brothers and sisters directly. At some point we must break these racist laws. It’s the capitalist racist system that is the root cause of these problems, not just Trump—after all, former President Barack Obama deported 3.2 million people in his eight years in office. Communism, a system run by workers with no wage and profit system and no borders, is the only solution to these growing fascist attacks. Building multiracial, working class unity for communism through outreach, potluck dinners, other gatherings, and sharper class struggle are needed to grow our Party into the fighting organization the working class needs.

MEXICO, March 8—One of the main ideological weapons used by the capitalist class to attack and divide the working class is sexism, particularly the oppression of women workers. Capitalism uses racism to divide the working class into supposedly “different” categories of Black, white, Latin and Asian, or amongst indigenous and non-indigenous. In a similar way, sexism divides the working class into groups of men and women, each with supposed inherent differences beyond what the biological sciences can prove. These so-called “differences” usually all end up saying men are superior in some way. Placing a particular emphasis on these differences between women and men workers intentionally hides the psychological, economic, social and even other biological similarities amongst workers.
Another way capitalists try to divide women and men workers politically is through their efforts to commercialize March 8, International Women’s Day, a day of communist struggle against oppression of women in the capitalist system. This day has an aspect of consciousness and organization that all women and men workers have to honor and rescue.  
Capitalism: Division, Oppression and Conquest
The capitalist profit system uses their political weapon of sexism to economically exploit women more intensely than men. According to data from one of the bosses’ main international mouthpieces, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the salary gap between women and men workers in 2014 was 18%, and the employment gap was 35%, both for comparable jobs. Women internationally also disproportionately shoulder the “double burden” of taking care of most of the domestic home labor, are the main caregivers and do most child upbringing, without ever getting paid.
The working class of Mexico is a case study in sexism and why the international working class must smash this entire capitalist system. The Mexican bosses’ government’s National Institute of Statistics calculated that the value of “routine work done in the home” alone was worth more than 20 percent of the entire national economy, or GDP, and 80 percent of this labor is done by women workers. This report acknowledged that domestic labor is more valuable than manufacturing (16.7 percent), commerce (15.5 percent), or education (4.1 percent) (INEGI, 4/7/16).
The main consequence from this sexist exploitation by the capitalists in Mexico can be seen at different levels. The most visible is sexual harassment, found on the streets or buses, work and school. Another way the capitalist culture normalizes both the violence of intensified economic exploitation and physical violence against women is through their media and promotion of pornography, a multibillion dollar world industry worth more than three professional sports leagues in the U.S. (New York Times, 5/20/01). More than 30 percent of women in Mexico have suffered sexual violence at least once, with the actual numbers likely higher because women are terrorized into not reporting attacks.
Less visible but interrelated forms of violence against women workers in Mexico, and the most brutal, are the “femicides.” A pandemic average of six women workers are murdered there each day, with 24 percent of them ever investigated, and 1.6 percent of murderers sentenced (Al Jazeera America, 1/4/15). These femicides are the main cause of death for working class women between the ages of 15-30 (INEGI 2016).  
Bosses Mislead With Liberalism
Sexism is an integral and essential part of the capitalists system. It generates tremendous profits worldwide, and is an ideological political weapon to weaken and divert working class struggle by pitting women and men workers against each other. Even when the capitalists use liberal policies to minimize inequality amongst men and women, they can’t eliminate it, because it goes hand in hand with capitalism. In contrast to Mexico, the capitalists of Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Norway and others gloat about their advances for women.
The liberal capitalist press all over the world has been gushing particularly about Iceland’s new laws mandating equal pay for women, and is held up as proof that capitalism can benefit both workers and bosses. This is false. Capitalism “gave” women workers nothing - with the support of many men workers, women waged strikes and fought for decades for higher pay and recognition of domestic labor in these countries. Even then, women and men workers are still not equal.
Closing gender pay gaps between women and men does not lead to women workers’ power. In between their vocal praise, the bosses’ press admits that “shifts in the political climate” in Iceland can “easily demolish” these gains (Guardian, 10/28/14). In other words, what the capitalists allow one day, they can take away the next.
Furthermore, at the same time that Iceland and other Nordic countries are now “mandating” equal pay, these laws often do not apply to immigrant women escaping imperialist conflict. In Iceland, racist immigration laws went so far as to mandate DNA testing for immigrants to prove “Icelandic” heritage (Iceland Review, 12/21/04).
Working Class Needs Red Women Leadership
Sexism can only be eliminated through a communist revolution, which will not only eliminate exploitation, but also abolish the special oppression of women and the sexist behavior.    
Capitalists promote liberal ideas like feminism to struggle for women’s “rights”, and more “equality” amongst the sexes. These feminist movements have dragged many strong women fighters into liberal and right-wing struggles and even turned them against men workers. The workers need to be united and organized into a revolutionary party for communism so we can fight against the root cause of sexism; capitalism.
Humanity had its biggest advances in its struggle against sexism, when the workers took political power and applied antisexist politics in the Soviet Union and China.  In the period of 1926 to 1961, in the Soviet Union, women’s salary increased 10 times, while the number of women engineers went from 600 to 379,000 from 1917 to 1961. There were similar advances in health and political representation. The law established gender equality - and workers defended these gains with their workers’ dictatorship. PLP has analyzed these victories elsewhere - as well as their weaknesses. Even with these advances the old communist movement did not eliminate sexism. It did however show the way forward to change the system dominated by a capitalist minority, and advance toward a society run by the working majority,  communism.

President Donald Trump’s racist immigration policy escalates a venerable ruling-class tradition of scapegoating and terrorizing immigrant workers. In addition to officially banning workers and refugees from six majority Muslim countries, the Trump administration has promised to increase deportations and detention of undocumented workers—an ambitious goal, given that Barack Obama’s administrations formally removed a record 3.1 million immigrants (Migration Policy Institute, 1/26).
The Department of Homeland Security is expected to double the number of people held in immigration concentration camps, to 80,000 a day. The asylum division of DHS has reported locating 20,000 beds for indefinite detention for asylum-seekers, a 500 percent increase over current capacity (MSNBC, 3/3). Meanwhile, 30,000 Haitian migrants are stranded at the U.S.-Mexico border, waiting to cross (UPI, 2/28).
The Clintons’ Terror Campaign
U.S. bosses have banned and persecuted migrants since the 1790s, when the rulers feared French immigrants influenced by the French Revolution. But today’s racist anti-immigrant hysteria descends from legislation created by the Bill Clinton administration in 1996. As Clinton starved thousands of children and tore citizen families apart through mass incarceration, he also expanded the grounds for jailing and deporting immigrant families (including permanent residents) for minor, nonviolent convictions. The law also made it much more difficult to gain asylum (Salon, 4/27/16). Beginning with the Clinton era, every president deported explosively more than his predecessor.
Smash racist deportations! Black immigrants are deported at five times their number in the undocumented population, and they are twice as likely to be detained for a criminal conviction (Time, 9/30/15).  This is the legacy Trump is advancing.
Ruling-Class Terrorists Divided
The U.S. rulers are divided over the best way to discipline their own class and the working class in a society headed inevitably toward a broader global war. Trump’s intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric has served to divide the working class and distract many workers from the capitalists’ wholesale thievery and exploitation.
But as Trump funds an expansion of the fascist Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) apparatus, the administration’s anti-immigrant racism poses a conflict for the U.S. war machine. To defeat their Russian and Chinese imperialist rivals (see Egypt editorial), the rulers needed a committed, patriotic military. When Trump initially ordered a blanket ban on refugees from seven largely Muslim countries, 100 former government officials signed a letter opposing it. Among the signers were Madeleine Albright and Susan Rice, both of whom played significant roles in murdering masses of workers in the Middle East during the Clinton and Barack Obama administrations. The finance capital wing of the ruling class is signaling the unreliable Trump to curb his blatant racism that hurts U.S. chances at building a reliable army.
Fight the Fear
Immigrant workers have a long history of fightback. The only response to Trump’s massive racist attack must be to organize. The only safety for undocumented workers can come from a united working class fighting the capitalist state. Many of the greatest leaders in the historical communist movement in the U.S. were immigrants, including Louis C. Fraina, Claudia Jones, Otto Huiswoud, and Claude McKay. The Progressive Labor Party will carry on the practice of fighting in the interest of the international working class. While competition and division are inherent to capitalists, the world’s working class is naturally collective. Forward to a world without borders!