Unity against the machine

We are sick and tired of large corporations treating our communities as nothing more than a source to extract capital from. We place the blame on all bad actors:

• the corporate insurance companies deciding who is worthy of care
• the governmental agencies that decide how resources are allocated
• the academic, public, and for-profit medical centers that worry more about their bottom line than their patients’ lives.

These groups together uphold the medical-industrial complex (MIC) by employing racial capitalism, neoliberal commodification of health, systems that assign “deservingness” to public/social services, and measurement of radical reform by how it affects the markets rather than the people.

We understand that the MIC cannot be destroyed without long-term, sustained, collective action. We also know that many groups are responsible for maintaining the MIC, and that they should all be held accountable. The end of the UCLA Health-HCLA contract is just another instance of corporate greed going mask-off, while trying to hide, deny, delay, and convince those that provide or receive care that this is the status quo. Though today we have demands for UCLA Health, we do not absolve other bad actors of guilt and hope to continue pressuring all organizations that are complicit in maintaining a broken healthcare system.