Mission

Under capitalism, the means of production and indeed the means of life itself are controlled by the capitalist class. Medical services, a crucial necessity for survival, become commodified and privatized such that healthcare becomes inaccessible and expensive for the working class. In the US, in particular, healthcare access is controlled by private health insurers, whose plans are offered to workers through their employers. This further ties one’s livelihood to the capitalist system, as access to medical care is tethered to one’s employment.

Decommodifying Health Care

Private health insurers reap enormous profits by imposing barriers that restrict access to healthcare. These restrictions include increasing premiums and out-of-pocket costs as well as plans that don’t cover certain types of treatment. For example, United Healthcare, which administers the Caltech student insurance plan, posted record profits in the spring of 2020, while also increasing the cost of the plan so significantly that Caltech administrators cut student insurance benefits to offset this cost increase. The fight for high-quality, affordable health insurance at Caltech is a symptom of this broader failure of the American medical system, in particular the private insurance industry. In order to make medical care available to all who need it, we must nationalize health insurance, and ultimately the entire private healthcare system. 

The privatization of medical services harms chronically ill and disabled people the most, as it further limits their participation in a society built to exclude them from the workforce and public and private spaces in general. It forces chronically ill and disabled people to one the one hand consume high-cost, private medical services while at the same time being excluded from employment on account that our bodies “deviate from the norm,” a norm conceptualized around what would be most profitable for a capitalist. As socialists, then, we seek to build worker solidarity and power in our communities by 1) advocating for the decommodification of all medical services and 2) pressuring Caltech to offer a health insurance plan that works for all workers, and especially for chronically ill and disabled workers.