Labor Shall Rule
9th December 2009, 01:21
In the last five months, I've worked with the Erie Health Care Coalition (http://yourerie.com/content/video/?cid=71851) and the Universal Health Care Action Network (http://www.uhcan.org/) in demanding affordable health care for all. In the meetings that I would have before we mobilized, it was obvious that most of us (if not all) supported HR676—John Conyer's and Dennis Kucinich's Medicare-for-All bill. In using local “town hall” style meetings, we brought people together to fight for single-payer. The signing of petitions, and the use of phonebanks, was effective in bringing more and more people out to support reform. In fact, a decent number of people would come out to our rallies outside of the health insurance companies. We even got the Erie City Council to sign a resolution in support of health care reform.
But a problem with large single issue campaigns is that they are largely reformist in their outlook—indeed, much of the organizing efforts that I was involved in was based on getting people to voluntarily write letters and visit the offices of our legislators. It was also very top-down in it's structure. So we were given no choice but to put ourselves in place and to stop being "infantile leftists" as Marc Stier called it (http://blog.stier.net/?p=822), and to embrace Obama's health care plan in our day-to-day work. I am having a conflict of moral purpose here. I know that, as a socialist, it's very practical to demand single-payer. It's also easy to see how corporate lobbying has effected the formation of the public policy around health care reform. But at the same time, I feel like there is something really "far-left" about many advocates for single-payer.
There is a real lack of political clarity and leadership from the anti-capitalist left when it comes to the national debate about health care reform. In fact, it doesn't seem like that many ‘revolutionary’ organizations could make much of a difference in the debate anyway. It would make sense-in principle-to denounce how weak the reforms are. But I think this would alienate a lot of progressive people and block the legislation from being passed immediately. Which leads me to my next question: what is to be done? How can we make waves? How can we fight for health care reform while still denouncing the system that creates medical bill bankruptcies and "pre-existing conditions" in the first place?
But a problem with large single issue campaigns is that they are largely reformist in their outlook—indeed, much of the organizing efforts that I was involved in was based on getting people to voluntarily write letters and visit the offices of our legislators. It was also very top-down in it's structure. So we were given no choice but to put ourselves in place and to stop being "infantile leftists" as Marc Stier called it (http://blog.stier.net/?p=822), and to embrace Obama's health care plan in our day-to-day work. I am having a conflict of moral purpose here. I know that, as a socialist, it's very practical to demand single-payer. It's also easy to see how corporate lobbying has effected the formation of the public policy around health care reform. But at the same time, I feel like there is something really "far-left" about many advocates for single-payer.
There is a real lack of political clarity and leadership from the anti-capitalist left when it comes to the national debate about health care reform. In fact, it doesn't seem like that many ‘revolutionary’ organizations could make much of a difference in the debate anyway. It would make sense-in principle-to denounce how weak the reforms are. But I think this would alienate a lot of progressive people and block the legislation from being passed immediately. Which leads me to my next question: what is to be done? How can we make waves? How can we fight for health care reform while still denouncing the system that creates medical bill bankruptcies and "pre-existing conditions" in the first place?