The Black Commentator - Single-Payer Healthcare - Part 5 - From Slumber To Grassroots Political Action

“I never worked for an organization but for a cause.”

Ella Baker (1968)

The people residing in the United States, across all demographic classifications, are arousing from a deep sleep. The ever increasing costs of health care premiums, co-pays, and prescription drugs, the ever-diminishing quality of health insurance coverage, the growing numbers of the uninsured and woefully under-insured, and finally, the deep pain and misery from the inexorable rise in premature deaths and illnesses due to a failed health care system, have shaken the consciousness of ordinary folks from slumber to grassroots political action.

Indeed, the severe health care crisis in the United States has ignited a movement like nothing since the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Healthcare-Now is an expression of that movement. We are ordinary folks organizing against health care apartheid imposed on the poor, the middle-class, people of color, and all people because of and in spite of their citizenship and employment status. The absolute wall of separation is the inability to pay for medically necessary health care. The draconian pass laws are the rigid and irrational public and private regulations that deny people access to adequate health insurance coverage and necessary health care.

However, the people have spoken. The people want a single-payer health care system in the United States that is an expanded and improved Medicare program for all who reside in this country. And they want it now.

Ajamu Sankofa foreground, moderating Harlem Community Truth Hearing on December 19, 2006. In background from left to right, are speakers Donn Mitchell and Jean Corbett Parker telling the truth of their health trauma under the present failed health care system in the United States.

But how do we organize to win such an historic new health care system in the United States in a political climate where the mass media is dominated by corporations, in a political climate where the propaganda of fear reigns supreme, in a political climate where, with a stroke of the pen, the foundations of the domestic constitutional legal system are being eviscerated? And what do we do in a political climate where the government commits, with impunity, the highest international law violations known to humankind by slaughtering thousands of innocent and defenseless people abroad for no other reason than to steal their valuable natural resources?

What do we do?

We dig deep into our hearts and souls to prevent our humanity from slipping away, find our self-confidence and courage, and then pull up the fortitude to fight back for the cause of freedom, justice, and peace. Remember we are not alone. The “power of the people” is not a mere phrase; it is a reality.

As recently as 2006, credible professional national polling organizations in the United States have shown that two thirds of the public prefers a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered like Medicare, and that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers, as opposed to the current employer-based system.

In November 2006, a Gallup poll revealed that 69% of the public agreed that it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that all Americans have health coverage. Further, the national polls have recently revealed that 56% or more of the U.S. population believe that the Iraq war was a mistake and that 52% or more believe that the Iraq war has not made the people of the United States safer. In February 2006, the Zogby International polling organization revealed that 72% of the American troops serving in Iraq thought that the U.S. should exit the country in 2007 and more than one in four of these soldiers believed that they should have left in 2006.

However, the power of the people does not rest in the fact that a two thirds or more majority of the population agrees with a position that the U.S. government opposes. Rather, the power of the people rests in the people’s consciousness of its power and in the people’s intelligent, strategic, and unrelenting political application of that power through independent direct action to create the change that it seeks. That is the simple lesson of the history of social change.

The national movement for a single-payer national health care system in the United States would make a grievous misstep if it assumed that the increased power that the Democratic Party will now wield in the 110th Congress assures it an advance in this historic struggle for the fundamental, radical, and requisite transformation of the health care system in the United States. The national movement can not afford such naiveté.

The avoidance of that misstep is precisely why Healthcare-Now does not weigh itself down with a self-made bureaucracy and overhead. Healthcare-Now is fully decentralized and organizes from the “bottom up” and not the “top down.” The people who are waking up to the health care crisis are the bottom and totality of Healthcare-Now. They are fully autonomous every-day people, exercising their inalienable right to win health care now as a human right in the United States as their God-given talents envision it.

The movement’s task is to neutralize, politically, the power of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries to buy, sell and otherwise control, for their narrow profit-seeking privilege, the federal elected officials, who are themselves members of an already corporate dominated and controlled United States Congress. Let’s look at the political perspectives of those who will hold the three most powerful positions in the 110th House of Representatives:

The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D Cal.) signals that she does not favor a single-payer system. This is her position, despite the fact that in 2006, her State’s legislative body voted in a single-payer Bill that would guarantee comprehensive health insurance for all residents of California. The Bill was subsequently vetoed by the Republican Governor. One of Congresswoman Pelosi’s main campaign contributors is the American Hospital Association. AHA pays huge sums of money for lobbyists and campaign contributions to US Congresspersons for the explicit purpose of ensuring the status quo of the present failed health care system.

The House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer (D Md.), asserts that in the long run, the Democratic Party supports a system that provides universal health insurance to all “Americans.” He offers no definitions of what “universal” or “long term” means. He has not signed on to any single-payer legislation. His position essentially co-opts the language of the Healthcare-Now movement while casting aside its substance.

The incoming chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Charles Rangel (D NY), supported Congressman John Conyers’ (D. Mich.) single-payer Bill in the 109th Congress. But it remains to be seen what he will do in the 110th Congress. His Committee has jurisdiction over health. However, absent strident pressure from below, Rangel is expected to defer to Pelosi, his boss.

Indeed, pundits expect that the 2007and 2008 health reform agenda(s) of the Democratic Party will be, notwithstanding its hot air, essentially an attempt to limit its actions to giving government the power to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, to increase stem cell research, and to tweak Medicare. To paraphrase Malcolm X, this is like having someone thrust a nine inch dagger fully into your gut, pull it out only one inch, and then to expect you to survive.

Accordingly, the Democratic Party’s present political trajectory is justifiably expected to ensure the continuation of the failed health care system where the prerogatives of the health insurance and the pharmaceutical companies trump the will of the people. Further, Pelosi and Hoyer oppose the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. They also refuse to use the constitutional “power of the purse” to end this barbarous war and will undoubtedly not prevent the sending of more troops to Iraq during the last two years of the Bush Regime. In fact, they both affirmatively support some degree of US troop presence in Iraq for the indefinite future. Startlingly, Rangel is urging the reintroduction of the draft. He just might get his wish as US saber rattling with Iran continues to heat up. Don’t be shocked if the United States becomes more deeply enmeshed in a dangerous multi-nation regional war of its own making in what it calls the “Middle East” within the next two years.

The contemporary political culture of frontier violence and wanton greed among the elite of the United States, nurtured by both national political parties, stunts the growth of a political culture seeking to embrace health care as a human right. The illegal war in Iraq is a bipartisan policy of the United States government. However, the policy to undermine single-payer has also been a bipartisan policy of the United States government.

The legacy of the leadership of the Democratic Party regarding health care as a human right has been clear. From 1993 to 1994, during the Bill Clinton-Al Gore Administration, the executive branch rejected a single-payer health care system in spite of the fact that more congressional Democrats supported a single-payer system than supported the Clinton plan-the one that kept the insurance industry profiting off people’s dependence, desperation, and illness.

This week, congressman John Conyers (D Mich.) reintroduced the United States Health Insurance Act (or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act), HR 676. He must start over getting congressional support for this Bill that would create a single-payer health care system and that also recognizes health care to be a human right. However, the 2008 Presidential election campaign has begun. Hence, he may have a much tougher time getting support in this election season because the putative Democratic Party leading presidential contender, Senator Hillary Clinton (D NY), the architect of the 1993-94 Clinton-Gore plan, categorically rejects single-payer in any form. Interestingly, former Presidential candidate, Al Gore, is now a firm supporter of single-payer.

Vigilantly, the healthcare-now movement recognizes that it has a narrow but enormously fruitful window of opportunity to pull out all of its stops to mobilize the people before the historically spineless Democratic Party bends down to kiss the feet of the newest heir apparent representative of the interests of the health insurance industry, Senator Hillary Clinton (D NY). If the Democratic Party endorses Clinton’s health insurance industry-centered health care policy and if she wins the US Presidency, the window shuts, setting the movement back a bit. So, we all must boldly seize this moment now and up the ante, despite whatever windows of opportunity close in the future.

We shall seize this moment permanently until we are victorious by assisting an aroused population across this country to appreciate fully its human right to health care; we shall build self-confidence and courage. Our historic struggle for full health care security must continue.

We shall expose, for all to see, the actual harmful roles of the health insurance and the pharmaceutical industries. We shall also expose the complicit roles of the elected officials who represent the corporate interests above those of people seeking adequate health insurance coverage and access to adequate health care. Finally, we shall help to organize and mobilize the people politically to de-throne these scoundrels permanently from their capacity to deny a fundamental human right recognized by all the nations in the industrialized world.

Nothing is more powerful than to have more and more informed people share, on a non-ending basis, their real life stories of health care insecurity and injury, to each other across the country and to elected officials. Healthcare-Now is convinced that truth is power. We shall no longer be misinformed, misdirected, and mislead. Once we withdraw our consent to the tyranny of health care apartheid, its house of cards will fall. Power has always been in the hands of the people; it is just that too many of us have forgotten that unassailable fact.

Healthcare-Now is launching 1000 Truth Hearings across the United States that are helping folks to remember history and take charge of their destiny. On December 19, 2006, at the Harlem State Office building in New York City, over 100 people gathered to tell their truth and build the movement to exercise the political muscle to win a single-payer health care system in this country. The event was one of the movements’ 1000+ Truth Hearings emerging all over the United States.

Will Gand, an African-American man, could not personally attend the Harlem Community Truth Hearing because he was being dialyzed. However, he submitted the following testimony that was typical of the dozens of folks from all walks of life who shared their life experiences that night:

In the spring of 2000, I was employed by the Department of Social Services and HIP was my health carrier. I was already being treated for arthritis but started to feel very weak and just not well at all. I went to my HIP center several times during May and June. They took blood every time I came to the center; my ankles were always swollen. Swollen ankles are a classic symptom that there may be a problem with my kidneys. What HIP told me was that I should stop taking Vioxx for arthritis and come back in ten days.

I did this three times and every time I came back I felt worse. I sought help at emergency rooms but HIP would not authorize them to treat me. Finally, I became so weak that I could hardly get out of bed. A friend of mine visited me and took me to his doctor that he had been seeing for 15 years. His doctor examined me and sent me to an area hospital where he was a consultant. They examined me and determined that my kidneys had failed.

They dialyzed me and my recovery process began; but it was a long and strenuous process. The doctors told me that if I had waited more than a couple of more days, I would not have made it. My initial hospital stay was five weeks and during that time I lost 50 pounds. I had no health insurance except HIP and they stopped paying for my treatment after 8 days. The doctors determined that I needed to be hospitalized for [those] 5 weeks in order to save my life in spite of the fact that I had no medical insurance.

Will Gand speaks for all of us. We are millions all over this country and we are responding loudly, “Healthcare not Warfare, Pass HR 676” The Truth Hearings are a key organizing and mobilizing vehicle of this human rights grassroots work. We are also sending delegations of ordinary people to meet in the district offices of federal, state, and municipal elected officials so that they can see, first hand, the faces and the pain of the health care crisis in this country. We shall be blasting elected officials on a regular basis with faxes and emails. They may run but we will not permit them to hide.

We intend to construct a compelling political strategy that will force the US Congress to hold an official congressional hearing on comprehensive health care reform that examines all options, during the week of April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are also borrowing from the best of the direct action tactics and strategies of the movement that dismantled Jim Crow in the United States. Our experiences give renewed and very specific meaning to Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous plaintiff cry, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” We give Ms. Hamer’s plea more power today as we heed the brilliant organizing strategies of Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and so many unsung heroes and sheroes of movements past. Frankly, this means the shelving of the “politics of respectability” as Ella Baker counseled the civil rights activists throughout the United States.

If you desire to hold a Community Health Truth Hearing, contact us. We will offer you technical assistance, contacts, and speakers at your request and we will assist you in translating your emerging awareness into effective grassroots political action according to your autonomous efforts.

Focus on fighting for the cause based on truth and courage; the brilliant diversity of organizational forms will emerge in your community along with the indomitable human spirit that runs through them. This is how Jim Crow was defeated. We always kept our eyes on the prize then.

Ms. Desiree Mingo, a diabetic, tells her truth of economic loss and severe health care insecurity caused by the failed health care system in the United States at the Harlem Community Health Truth Hearing on December 19, 2006.

Today, more than two-thirds of the general public see the health care crisis more clearly than ever before in the history of this country. We are not alone; and we are growing every day. Indeed, we have the moral authority and the awesome power to the same extent as our foremothers and forefathers had who braved dogs, fire hoses, vigilantes, and union busters.

Together we will win. Fear not. Our cause is one whose time has come. We will not be stopped.

Now, we want to hear from you.

Call Healthcare-Now at 212- 475-8350 or 800-453-1305 for more information. We will assist you in organizing your community for passage of HR 676. Together we have the power to prevail. Please go to Healthcare-Now.org for a full description and analysis of HR 676 and suggestions on how you can help us to make HR 676 the law of the land.

Mr. Sankofa is a human rights public policy specialist and community organizer. He is a national organizer for Healthcare-Now. He is also the strategic planning consultant for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, Legal Defense, Research, and Education Fund. As a former trial attorney, specializing in complex institutional reform litigation, Mr. Sankofa, directed the AIDS Project of the National Prison Project of the ACLU Foundation. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine and the Antioch School of Law. Raised in Washington, DC, Mr. Sankofa now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Click here to contact Ajamu K. Sankofa, Esq. and Healthcare-NOW.

Click here to read any of the articles in this special BC series on Single-Payer Healthcare.