The Truth Commission in Oakland helped break the dangerous silence around how urgently we need a better health care system.  The 2008 effort was designed to reach a broader audience than WEAP’s 2006 Truth Commission, which relied on mainstream media news coverage to spread the word.  To see a video of highlights from the 2008 Truth Commission, click here (link coming soon).  Together, we worked at breaking the silence more broadly this time around by creating media accessible to more people.   You too can help break the silence where you live by learning about how poverty affects your life and why health care should be a human right.   Then spread the word about what you have learned, even if that means telling only one person a day about the opportunity we have right now to achieve universal health care. For tools to educate yourself and others, use the WEAP website, which includes a News & Notes section, a Health Care is a Human Right Toolkit, a Health Care Survey, and much more.  For an even more interactive learning experience, we invite you to attend one of our Health Care is a Human Right trainings.  Just e-mail weap@weap.org to schedule one.

For more than three hours, members of the 2008 Truth Commission audience lined up at a microphone to tell their stories.  Most were just as tragic as the story of Carolyn Milligan, a hard working single mother whose diabetes spiraled unnecessarily and dangerously out of control because she lost her health insurance when she became sick.  This loss of health insurance caused Carolyn to lose her eyesight and her kidney function.  Now an organizer for single payer universal health care, Medicare shows her a bill for $30,000 a month that private insurance companies send the government for her dialysis.  Carolyn's story, like most throughout the day, illustrated the hidden truth that our society allows insurance corporations to make enormous profits off of people's illnesses, especially society's most vulnerable: the poor, low-income workers, women, the  elderly, youth, minorities, veterans, immigrants, the disabled, and countless others who fall through the widening gaps in our shredded social safety net.  

Jen Lee from Asian Health Services told about an uninsured elderly patient who qualified for MediCal (California’s Medicaid), but was having an incredibly difficult time getting approved even as he simultaneously struggled with a brain tumor.  After half a year of fighting without adequate medical care, he died the day before his MediCal application was finally approved.  Another woman told about how her husband’s pre-existing condition, arthritis, kept him from securing much-needed health insurance.  Many who were able to access care talked about its poor quality and out-of-control costs.  Others explained how the governor's budget cuts have severely hampered health care funding for low-income people in California.  When Britta Duncan, who traveled from Portland Oregon for the day, stepped up to the mike, she first talked about the shock of having doctors tell her to take her foster son home to die.  They refused to spend time or money on him because of his low-income status.  Yet, she credits her union with helping her fight for her son’s right to health care and that is the reason he is walking and talking today. Britta believes that only a single payer system that includes everyone can stop the unfair cruelty of our current privatized system.

Nancy Lewis, a family nurse practitioner was the keynote speaker.  As someone intimately involved everyday with our health care system, she was able to give the participants a personal and powerful look at the deeply broken condition of health care in the US.  She proclaimed, "What we have is not a health care system, but a health care industry, designed to make money off of us, the patients, without delivering adequate patient care."  She described how the low income clinic where she works continues to lose desperately needed funding, and how she often has to choose between turning away someone in dire need of medical attention or paying out of her own pocket to treat them. Being the type of heroine that she is, Nancy chooses the latter.  Most stirringly, Nancy ended her speech by displaying her Nurses Registration card to the crowd, urging, "I want you to look at this card that I am holding up.  It is not a credit card; it is my nursing license.  So let's get busy, we have a lot of work to do."   What Nancy was saying is that while she will gladly pay for a patient in need because our system has failed that patient, she did not become a nurse in order to worry and be held back by finances.  Her Nurses Registration card should never be synonymous with a credit card because this takes away from the care she is trained to give and this is exactly what our privatized system is asking of her: to put finances first and patients second.  Nancy, better than anyone, knows that we have a lot of work to do in order to gain a US health care system that includes efficiency, quality, affordability, and most importantly, dignity.

In 2008 the horror stories that people told remained as awful and inhumane as those heard during WEAP's first Truth Commission in 2006, a vivid confirmation of what studies show: U.S. health care is getting worse, not better.  This year WEAP included more information from people involved in national efforts to push for single-payer universal health care.  The audience heard from Healthcare NOW's National Coordinator Marilyn Clement about the status of the single payer national health insurance act HR 676.  Other speakers and performers included the Hip Hop Congress' Executive Director Shamoko Nobel and the Community Homeless Alliance Ministry's Adrienne Lawton.

After a lunch appreciatively provided by St. Mary's Senior Center, WEAP conducted a brief but concise teach-in for those who wished to learn more about the health care crisis and the solution to it.  Dr. Sal Sandoval, a bilingual family practice physician who serves primarily farm workers and other rural poor, began by giving comments about the lack of quality and affordable health care available to his patients.  Even more frighteningly, he talked about how his patients are the ones mistakenly being blamed for our health care crisis, rather than the health insurance companies whose policies are the ones deciding who has enough “value” to “deserve” care.  Then a presentation by Standing to Represent our Next Generation (STRONG) and WEAP members based on WEAP's new "Health Care: A Human Right" pamphlet helped to further tease out the issues.  Of special interest was clarifying that the individual mandate solutions being pushed by many politicians is not true universal healthcare but really legislation that would subsidize health insurance companies and their profits even further.  For a copy of this pamphlet, click here.