The crisis in health care is up close and personal.  It touches you, your family, your friends, and everyone in our city, our county, our state, and our nation.  It devastates the lives of millions who can’t get the amount or the quality of health care they need. We see and feel the health care crisis all around us, we can’t get away from it – people struggling to keep their kids healthy, struggling with the awful effects of chronic diseases, struggling to move around, struggling even to breathe.  An adequate health care system could prevent most of this agony and tragedy.

Oakland now is in a similar position to New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina.  Oakland residents are disproportionately poor, disproportionately in poor health, disproportionately without adequate health care, disproportionately ill-housed, disproportionately victims of crime, disproportionately in bad jobs or no jobs at all.  Those circumstances are pretty much ignored by political, business, and civic leaders -- and those leaders who are trying to improve things need help.  Oakland should not wait for a major earthquake or other disaster to make these problems a focus of public attention.  They should be addressed now in a manner that helps more people see, and support, better public policies.  Actions that improve life in Oakland can improve life everywhere.

 

This is not an insoluble problem.  The absence of health care for more than 7 million California workers, 165,000 of them from Alameda County, is a crisis of enormous proportions.  And the number of uninsured keeps rising dramatically as more and more businesses cut back on health care and other benefits.  But California, with the 8th largest economy in the world, is fully capable of providing health care for all of its residents.  All it has to do is take corporations out of the health care system.  The corporate takeover of health care has resulted in staggering numbers of uninsured workers in the United States today. If we want change, if we want justice, we will have to educate, organize, and act to get the justice we need.  If not now, when?  If not us, who? 

Building on years of fighting for Health Justice and Poverty Elimination, WEAP, working with our partners in organized labor, recovery centers, homeless centers, and foster care, hosted a Truth Commission on the health care injustice in our city.  Congresswoman Barbara Lee was Co-chair.  Together, we determined that several items (see them below) were minimum requirements for struggling forward and rallying other workers and community people to fight for comprehensive health reform.  Part of our Truth Commission conclusions was the importance of framing our cause in moral terms - Health Care is a Human Right!  We formulated other tools to help our cause, such as “The Six Building Blocks,” or principles of unity, toward Health Care for All.  We circulated an important Health Care Human Rights Survey throughout the city, county, and state.  We submitted these tools along with others to Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums’ Taskforce on Universal Health Care.

Because research shows that poverty makes all ailments worse, we need to proceed from strategies committed to ending poverty and promoting a single payer universal health care system that would cover all people living in the United States from birth to death.   By taking administrative waste and corporate profit out of the health care system, we can have comprehensive and universal health care without spending any more money. For resource starved cities like Oakland and New Orleans, and increasingly for rural areas as well, proposals are being discussed that would incorporate all people living in the United States, who would get the health care they need and deserve with 95% of taxpayers saving money.

Who would benefit?  Employed and unemployed workers, part-time and temporary workers, young adults (ages 18-24 who represent 33% of the nation's uninsured), the elderly, and ALL residents of the United States, documented or not. 

How would we get there?  There are strategic plans being debated.  There are proposals pending in Congress and in several states for proposals that would include doctor visits, nursing home and long-term care, hospitalization, preventative and rehabilitative service, access to specialists, prescription drugs, mental health treatment, dental and vision services, occupational health services, and medical supplies and equipment. All this can be done for the same amount of money we are spending now, according to calculations by proponents for single payer/universal health care.

Our deliberations suggest plans of action on four fronts:  We need to raise the level of citizen awareness that these goals are reachable.  We need to raise the level of public discussion about the need to achieve these goals.  We need to put into play some specific programs to begin the march to achieve them.  And at the heart of this plan, we need to get more poor, low wage, and middle-income workers demanding more action from our public officials. 

We can use a variety of strategies on these four action fronts. To generate strong citizen support for universal health care and raise its visibility, a city sponsored health care initiative should support adoption of single payer and universal health care on a federal level.  A second strategy would be to strongly support more resident-driven Truth Commission hearings to highlight the plight of people trapped by the existing health care system.  A third strategy would be to lead an effort with state and federal policy makers to develop a “Housing First” policy that works, based on the concept that the way to end homelessness is to provide housing for people.  Homelessness is one of the anchors of poverty.  Housing First is a good model, but current Housing First programs, including one in San Francisco and another supported by the Bush Administration, are not working because they are not funded at the appropriate level.  The fourth front would be to lead an effort to develop policies to provide a job at a living wage to every resident who needs one.  The public increasingly understands how the corporate agenda of slashing the costs of labor in every way possible puts at risk their lives in the present and their dreams for the future. 

The task now is waging a determined political battle to obtain the justice we need in health care.  To get there, it will take a broad and powerful social movement, similar to the movements that ended legal segregation and that advanced labor rights in the last century.  Pursuing a strategy for poverty elimination and health care as a human right needs to become the mission of our city, state, and nation. Building a Residents Movement for the Health Justice and Poverty Elimination will be essential to fighting for the future of our nation.


WHAT WE NEED  FOR HEALTH JUSTICE!

Single-Payer Universal Healthcare

1. 1 Tier - 1 payer for all medical costs, 1 standard of care for all.

2. Universal Care Now. Everybody In, Nobody Out.

3. Public accountability, not corporate control

4. Comprehensive coverage, including primary care, in-patient care, out-patient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, long term care, mental health services, dental care, eye care, chiropractic care, substance abuse treatment, and preventive care.

5. Choice of physicians, providers, hospitals, clinics, and practices.

6. Protect our health, not insurance and pharmaceutical company profits.

7. Just Tranistion- Guarantees that the estimated 1.25 million displaced health care industry workers receive full income, benefits, and tuition as they make the transition to alternative work.