Beating Swords Into Scalpels

Five days before the April 15 income tax filing deadline, at a time when more people than usual are pondering government spending priorities as they calculate their annual tax bill, I spent the day with a group of activists working to divert the money we currently spend on war into guaranteeing healthcare for all.

The Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) sponsored this one-day conference in Wayne, PA, which drew participants from ten states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachussetts, California, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware). The photo above, taken by PDA National Field Coordinator Conor Boylan, shows a working group discussing efforts to take the fight for single-payer healthcare, or "Medicare For All", from the national level to individual states. As one participant from Ontario reminded us, the Canadian single-payer system began in the province of Saskatchewan, then moved to other provinces before eventually being implemented at the federal level.

If the woman at the table looks familiar, you probably remember her from the Michael Moore film Sicko, where Donna Smith was shown moving in with her daughter after the medical bills from her cancer treatments and her husband's heart attacks had forced her into bankruptcy. Donna is now Co-Chair of PDA's Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, and she helped lead most of the day's discussions, together with Chuck Pennacchio, who ran as a progressive alternative to Bob Casey in the 2006 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and is now Executive Director of Health Care For All Pennsylvania.

Ben Day, Executive Director of Mass-Care (shown to Donna's left in the photo), explained the failures of the Massachussetts healthcare reform and its individual insurance mandate, on which the just-passed federal bill was based. Rather than control costs, premiums have continued their double-digit annual increases since this Romneycare came into being. People are also getting less coverage for these higher premiums, as the commercial health insurance companies move towards high-deductible plans that increase out-of-pocket expenses.

Dan Hodges of Health Care For All California (shown to Ben's left) discussed the single-payer bills which passed the state legislature in 2006 and 2008, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dan reminded us that the public campaigns around each of these bills presented a teachable moment which educated more Californians about how health insurance companies operate as a cartel to fix prices, and how existing single-payer systems in Canada and the U.S. (Medicare) operate more efficiently and with lower overhead rates.

Vic Edgerton, Chief of Staff for Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), urged us to continue building visible grassroots support for single-payer outside the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, so that kindred spirits inside the legislatures, like his boss, can have more weight behind their arguments. As President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly told a group of reformers, "you've convinced me; now go out there and make me do it."

For those who might ask how our government would pay to cover everyone, the $33 billion supplemental spending bill to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, scheduled to be voted on by Congress this month, was identified as a good healthy start. That's right, this is another supplemental war bill, on top of the money already appropriated in the regular budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite President Obama's promise that he would end this practice held over from the Bush regime.

It was invigorating to spend the day with these activists who take seriously Dr. Martin Luther King's admonition from his April 4, 1967 speech at New York City's Riverside Church: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."