(Below is the as-prepared text of a speech recently given by the Executive Director of the Women’s Economic Agenda Project – Ethel Long-Scott.  A portion was delivered to the annual Health Care, Now!  Strategy Conference in St. Louis, Missouri on November 14, 2009.)

It’s pretty clear that we are not going to get the comprehensive health care reform that we voted for when we voted for change and a message of hope.  The focus in Congress has been on protecting the predatory, profits first, well people second, sick people last, health care businesses who are already at the table.  So what should we do as we go forward?

We don’t need more single issue/identity politics.  We need broader, more comprehensive movement building that proceeds from the age old position that “an injury to one, is an injury to all.”

Going forward we get the opportunity to teach about a single payer plan that will bring up the standards to pay doctors and care providers so that we might have more of them in inner cities and rural areas, so that we might live.

Going forward will mean developing outreach that builds on multiple human rights values, including eliminating poverty and respecting the rights of women, including women who need the opportunity to make their own choices about their bodies.

Going forward we need to elevate our fight for Health Care for All as part of crafting a new social contract that addresses economic sustainability and viability for our people and the earth.  Because the old social safety net is being destroyed, because we are being failed by both major parties, it will take a broad peoples’ movement dedicated to teaching about, and fighting for, a new America where Health Care is a right and NOT a privilege.

Going forward we need to build a broad transformative movement that provides health care for everyone.  This will include challenging popular corporate-sponsored rhetoric that Latinos - and undocumented workers specifically - are the reason for our health care debacle we have in America.

Going forward we’ve got to take on the tough issues like the primary causes of lack of health insurance, today, are loss of jobs and employers dropping health coverage, not undocumented workers, or other uninsured workers.

The reality is that what Congress is contemplating won’t help the 14,000 who are losing their health insurance every day.  The reality is health care costs are rising at a much higher rate than wages.

The struggle today of immigrants for human dignity, for respect, for health care was greatly harmed by the demands of corporate America in the recent health care battles. Our country has had a love-hate relationship with immigrants since the founding of our country. The Irish, Germans, Chinese and others… were needed to work the menial jobs and were treated with discrimination and disrespect.  Today it is the Latino undocumented workers who are the scapegoats.

Going forward it is time we challenge the insane notion of immigrants or other working people being responsible for low wages and lack of health care, in our cities, counties and states across America. It’s time to speak together very clearly that it is the corporate-controlled Federal and state governments, it is the power of the profit-driven multinational corporations, it is the money hungry financial corporations from Wall Street, it is our misguided capitalistic value system that prefers to exploit and oppress people rather than provide wages and services that enhance people's lives.

1 – This so-called Health care reform will leave intact the cash cow aspect that the insurance companies and drug manufacturers depend upon.         

2 – Any new costs to the health industry will be put on the backs of workers.

3 – Having the individual mandate in place alongside the ability to apply for the hardship is not a solution.  While it will help some, it will not contain or inhibit further price gouging that the Insurance Industry and private run health care can demand.        

4 – The hype that health care has been reformed will combine with hype about a reviving economy to create the illusion of another bubble, so that concern about access to adequate health care will be damped down and people will once again believe that it’s their own fault if they can’t get the health care they need.

5 – The argument that insurance companies will no longer be able to exclude people for pre-existing conditions is a lie.  Tell that to the many hospitals cutting beds, closing wings, shutting down whole institutions including clinics because they just aren’t profitable.  The most important pre-existing condition is not being able to afford health care.

6 - The discharge of poor people from hospitals to the streets won’t be fixed and the super poor and dispossessed will be affected by new homelessness, from foreclosures or retired from auto, and sugar mills, and so many others separated from their health care by loss of a job.      

7 - It will do nothing to stop the god awful practice of state-sponsored killing of workers through new measures of cutting life saving medical treatments on a state level, like is happening in my state of California, or renewed measures against mentally ill souls and the poor generally being dumped back onto the streets, under bridges, or leaving them just to die on the floors of medical institution, as has been captured on cameras. How will this be mitigated one bit by the mess out of Congress?

It’s clear that for those of us facing multiple barriers as women, as the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless and poor who need health care not insurance and pretense of more accessibility, they have been failed.

Because Congress had a chance to focus on helping people or helping profits and they chose to help profits first.  We embrace the renewed fight on the state level.  We take the lessons of our defeat forward as we contemplate fighting forward so that we might live. 

BUILDING A BROAD TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT

So as we go forward we need to build on what has been accomplished, but we also need to consider working differently.  Immediately we need to have a campaign that puts head, heart, and feet together to secure the health care we need.

Where Congress lacks the will and conviction to secure workers rights, and pushes this crucial issue onto the states, we are the ones who must intervene in our states, fighting for World Health Organization standards which are better and are a beginning to secure the health care we need.

Going forward we need mass education campaigns, teach-ins, and direct actions that take U.S. health care horror stories and explain how the real life outcomes would have been better in other countries:  “Last year Mary Jones was inflicted with cancer.  Her health care cost her bankruptcy and her home.  If this had happened in Britain, France, or Canada, she would have been treated knowing her entire was not at risk. Is this really the health care reform we want?”

Going forward, our measure of success will be moving health care delivery away from being a business and toward being a guaranteed human right.   Going forward we get to re-double our efforts of asking people, “Now that we’ve had what’s called health care reform, is your health care what you need?”  We know what the answers will be.

Going forward means fighting in all these different ways for the right answer, the moral answer, the answer that we do have the resources to provide Health Care for everyone, single payer and universal health care.

HEALTH CARE: A HUMAN RIGHT

I want to expand on a few important details of what it means to go forward with this all-important campaign.

First, what do we mean by Health Care is an Economic Human Right? The right to health care is actually only one component of the right to health. When we say “the right to health” we don’t mean just the right to be healthy, not just the absence of disease. We mean that people have the right to reach their highest attainable state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing. Medical care is only one of the things that people need to be as healthy as possible. A few of the others are healthy food, adequate housing, the right to water and a clean environment, having control over your own life, and being able to fully participate in decisions about your community.  That is why in going forward, we must link all these things together.

Second, one of the lessons we have learned from fighting in California and throughout the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, as we battle to secure health care as a human right, is that we need to work to make sure all health related facilities, goods and services are available, accessible, acceptable, appropriate and of good quality.

It shouldn’t depend on things like being able to pay or whether your wheelchair will fit through the door.  Services must be acceptable to people of different cultural backgrounds and who speak different languages.

It’s part of what we call EVERYBODY IN, NOBODY OUT. Everyone means everyone, regardless of citizenship status, disability, ethnicity, incarceration, age, race, color, gender, or any of those other categories used to separate people from their rights as human beings.

Third, as we go forward, we must not forget that ultimately it is government’s responsibility to make progress towards the complete realization of human rights.  Corporations have made it abundantly clear that they see their primary responsibility as generating profits by any means necessary, and if that means throwing millions of people to the wolves, so be it.  That’s why we’re in the fix we’re in.  Going forward means building a sustainable movement to get health care out of the clutches of business and into the public arena.

Finally, we can use the value-based proposal by Dr. Howard A. Green, “What Government Does Better: Health Insurance - with a special focus on 9 Steps to Comprehensive Quality Health Care in America & Job Creation.”  You can find Dr. Green’s article and more information here.  Together these tools will allow us to build a broad social movement along with the unity we must have to get the health care we need so that we might live!

For nearly 40 years, Ethel Long-Scott has been on a mission to increase social and economic justice in jobs as varied as non-profit executive director, grassroots community organizer and political campaign strategist.  Often that has meant working with labor and community groups to create opportunities for constructive social change where none seemed to exist.  Always that has meant community organizing at a grassroots level to help ordinary people amplify their voices by teaming up with each other.

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