Building a Movement to End Health Disparities and Poverty- by Alicia Criado

By Alicia Criado
WEAP's Social Justice Manager
May 29, 2009
 

On May 19, 2009 WEAP’s Executive Director, Ethel Long-Scott, was invited to speak as the 10th Annual Spring Speaker during an event organized by The Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community (CJTC) at UC Santa Cruz. CJTC is a progressive, applied research institute that focuses on issues of social and economic justice, dialogues across diversity, and the building of collaborative communities. In a packed room of approximately 300 people, Ethel spoke passionately about health care and poverty issues, as the event was thematically titled “Health Care is a Human Right: Building a Movement to End Health Disparities and Poverty.”

CJTC's focus is on equity, diversity and justice, and so naturally, bringing Long-Scott to speak about single-payer universal health care and the elimination of poverty could not have been more appropriate. She began by laying the framework of our country’s economic turmoil and why we have seen the gradual meltdown of the social contract between workers and capital that we have known for decades. Unfortunately, from the labor market to the health care industry, profits are prioritized over people’s overall well-being, health, and happiness. We have workers rapidly losing jobs and the top twenty health care companies making billions of dollars in profits. In fact, given the tremendous profits currently being made and the billions spent on corporate bailouts, the US could easily afford to phase in a single payer Universal Health Care system in the United States tomorrow.

Long-Scott was clear that this economic system has come to fail the people of this country and that single-payer Universal Health Care is one perfect example of how much we the people would benefit from government intervention.  She talked about the major restructuring that is going on in the economy and in society due to the steady advances in computer technology that have brought labor-saving technology to the point where it is actually labor-replacing.  In this new paradigm, we don’t need masses of industrial workers like we used to, because one human being sitting at a computer console can now run an entire factory of computer-controlled machines churning out better products at lower prices than people used to produce.  She discussed how these new circumstance, "have created one worldwide economy where there is a global workforce of poor workers competing with labor-replacing technology everywhere.  This has created a crisis of global abundance, where the great mass of the world’s people cannot afford to buy the global abundance being produced.  And yet the global abundance being produced is for the first time in history enough to give every person on the planet a decent life, if it were distributed differently."

Long-Scott went on to carefully lay out several ways the participants could get involved in their communities, including the use of community Truth Commissions, in order to start shedding light on the many health and poverty injustices our brothers and sisters face everyday. The event ended with a Q & A section during which she fielded several questions from the audience, particularly around the single-payer specifics, like the cost and how care would be administered. Ultimately, Long-Scott made it clear that Health Care is a Human Right, and we must collectively work together to ensure that we strive for social and economic justice through the building of a broad social movement to end poverty and gain health justice.

The following morning the WEAP team met with two UCSC student groups, Chicanos in Health Education (CHE) and the Black Science Network (BSN) during a breakfast meeting sponsored by El Centro Resource Center.  The purpose of this meeting was to re-emphasize the role WEAP and the California Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (CA PPEHRC) plays in the health care struggle, expose them to the educational tools WEAP uses to train future advocates, remind students of their responsibilities as future health care professionals, and brainstorm ways students can get involved with WEAP and the health care is a human right campaign. During the conversation, it became clear that there is a hunger and desire among these students to transform the health care system as we know it today. However, many of them, like many in society, could not begin to fathom how to begin this transformation nor recognized their individual responsibility to ensure that every human being deserves access to affordable health care.

The overwhelming positive response WEAP received in Santa Cruz demonstrates once again that the people in this country are no longer willing to sit back and allow our government to prioritize profits over care. As CHE and BSN tout on campus, we must prioritize ways to “Prevent, Promote, and Protect” not just in how we practice medicine but in how we view the health care system as we know it. PREVENT corporations from continuing to make money off our ailments, PROMOTE the single-payer universal health care movement and PROTECT our human right to health care! In the words of Ethel Long-Scott: “Our health care system is telling us, in ever more tragic and costly ways, that people who don’t have wealth are not worth keeping healthy- or in many cases even alive.”  We must build a broad social movement dedicated to health justice and poverty elimination and which recognizes the new economic circumstances we currently face.  The time is now to craft a new social contract that can insure a sustainable economy for the many millions in our country, and the growing billions around the world, who lack the money & resources to secure the basics: food, shelter, education, health care, living wage jobs, and the ability to have lives where people can thrive not simply survive.