Guaranteed Healthcare

With the Democrats convening in Denver for their national convention that begins Monday, a lot of people Sunday were talking about the arc of history and the civil rights movement that has led to the pending nomination of Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic Party nominee for President.

But as we were reminded Sunday, our collapsing healthcare system is one of the key areas of unfinished business for the civil rights of all Americans.

At a civil rights forum Sunday sponsored by the Nation magazine, the Denver Public Library and Rocky Mountain PBS, the guest of honor was Rep. John Conyers, as it was noted the only Congressional candidate ever endorsed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Conyers has another distinction that is near and dear to the hearts of nurses and healthcare activists -- sponsor of HR 676, the single-payer, Medicare for all bill in Congress, as CNA/NNOC co-president Malinda Markowitz noted Sunday in a packed forum.

Following are excerpts of her speech:

"For decades John Conyers has been the conscience of the Congress, a model of what it means to be an elected leader whose mission in office is not to enrich the corporations and the people who like John McCain have ten homes.

"Tonight, we honor John as a  civil rights champion and pioneer.  What you might not know is John's visionary leadership in the fight for guaranteed healthcare for all, which can only be won through a single payer, Medicare for all type system, as would be achieved through, HR 676, the bill he has sponsored.

"Martin Luther King once famously said, "of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and most inhumane."

"What may be even more shocking is that 40 years later, that inequality and injustice is greater than ever.

"Dr. King's quest for justice can not be fully realized until the day when our health care is no longer determined by wealth, but by patient need.
 
"What's standing in the way?

"While John's bill, HR 676 has more co-sponsors than any health reform in Congress, there are still far too many who want to stop far short of what is needed to cure our national nightmare.

"People who think more insurance -- whether you're forcing people to buy private insurance or simply giving them public subsidies to buy it -- is somehow universal healthcare.

"Well it's not.

"As long as insurance companies can continue to deny care because they don't want to pay for it -- and cancel coverage for people when they get sick

"As long as insurance companies and drug companies and hospitals can continue to charge what ever they want -- and siphon off 30 cents of every healthcare dollar for billing, profits, and executive pay

"We'll continue to have a medical system that has made the U.S. last in the world among industrialized countries in preventable deaths.

"If we matched the criteria of those other countries, 100,000 fewer Americans would die prematurely every year -- that's 25 times the number of Americans who have died in Iraq.

"So why are some of our friends telling us to settle for what is politically expedient, for conventional wisdom about what can we achieved?

"If the civil rights movement taught us anything, it taught us the importance of struggle.

"It taught us that police dogs, and Jim Crow laws, and the politicians and the media experts telling us to go slow were wrong.

"They were on the wrong side of history. They were on the wrong side of humanity.

"It taught us that when millions of people get riled up, when we unite our power, when we get into the streets and the court of public opinion, that we can move mountains, and we can change the world.

"Let's honor John Conyers for a lifetime of struggle.

"Let's honor the civil rights movement for what it has achieved, and what we still need to achieve.

"Let's acknowledge that there can be no greater recognition of John Conyers' brilliant lifetime of work is to work together to win single payer, guaranteed healthcare for every American."