The dispute over privatized and public health care will be discussed at “Genocide and the General Black Welfare”, held by the Schiller Institute at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in room 134 of the Hale Black Cultural Center.
The institute is an arm of the economist and social activist Lyndon H. Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review organization, which has battled the government on issues ranging from health care to the current energy crisis. The privatization debate is centered around D.C. General Hospital in Washington, D.C., the only public hospital in the city. However, Schiller Institute leaders believe the events in the nation’s capital could hold serious ramifications throughout the country, including Ohio.
D.C. General Hospital provides emergency care to Washington, D.C.’s Southeast quadrant, an area populated primarily by low-income blacks. Attempts by city and federal officials to sell the struggling hospital to the privately-held Doctors Community Health Care Corporation have touched off a storm of political protest by the D.C. City Council. DCHC and its partner corporation, National Century Financial Enterprises of Dublin, Ohio, is facing fraud and embezzlement lawsuits in Boston, Mass., Durham, N.C., and Louisville, Ky. The criminal charges were first discovered by Anton Chaitkin, who studied the organization independently before sharing his findings with the Larouche organization.
“National Century Financial Enterprises is amassing a fortune stolen from health care institutions through classic gangster methods of embezzlement and fraud under (the) cover of money-lending,” Chaitkin wrote in a Larouche newsletter released March 8.
Schiller Institute officials believe DCHC/NCFE is engaged in a calculated conspiracy to dismantle the hospital and force poor blacks to relocate.
“This is what we estimate to be a trillion dollar real estate package. This thing has been called ‘The Negro Removal Plan’ by black activists in D.C. for some time,” said Rochelle Asher, director of the Schiller Institute and featured speaker of Wednesday’s meeting. “It goes beyond financial greed. This is a policy of genocide. It is a Ku Klux Klan policy.”
The conflict over the future of D.C. General Hospital is poised to spill into Congress. The D.C. City Council voted unanimously last week to divert $21.5 million to keep the hospital in public hands, a move D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, backed by the heavily Republican D.C. Financial Control Board, has promised to veto. If the council overrides the veto Congress will be forced to intervene, bringing the health care debate to the floor of Capitol Hill.
“You have to take a stand. This is a major battleground,” said Phil Valenti of the Schiller Institute. “Mr. Larouche has said that if you cannot defend health care in the nation’s capital, you cannot defend it anywhere in America. Washington, D.C. is a particularly central opinion because there is no voting for congressmen in the district.”
“This goes far beyond just Washington, D.C. Privatization is an attack on everything this nation is supposed to stand for,” said Asher. “You will have a hard time finding any place in America where deregulation has brought anything but grossly inflated prices to the consumer. Whenever you have privatization, the goal is to aid the stockholder, and that is no way to run a hospital.”
“The figures in Ohio are particularly disastrous,” Asher said, “Ohio had 4.4 beds per thousand people in 1984. In 1999, they were down to 3.3 beds per thousand. Approximately 1,500 hospitals nationwide have been shut down because of this one policy. It’s more than just DCHC, it’s a whole plan to reverse the Roosevelt/Kennedy idea that health care is a right, not a privilege.”
National Century Financial Enterprises Administration could not be reached for comment on this story.
