Medical Students to Rise Up for Single Payer Oct 1

[LongTomH]

From the Physicians for a National Health Program website: Future Doctors Rising Up for 'Medicare For All,' by Vanessa Van Doren:

For most of us in medicine, helping people live healthy, happy lives is at the heart of why we chose this career. We expound upon this in application essays, talk about it during interviews, and start medical school with this “calling” fresh in our minds.

Very early in our medical careers – on the wards and in the classroom – we learn that inequality, preventable illness, and death are an inherent part of our current private, for-profit-oriented health insurance system.

We see patients receive preventable amputations due to untreated diabetes. We see people permanently disabled by stroke because they were unable to afford their medications. College funds emptied out to pay for $100,000-a-year cancer treatments. Families bankrupted and lives destroyed.

We learn that, although the United States is one of the wealthiest countries on earth, we are also the only developed nation that does not provide health care to all of its citizens. We learn that we spend over 17 percent of our GDP – more than any country in the world – on this non-universal coverage. We learn that medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

.................//snip

Medical students across the country have already joined the fight for universal, single-payer health care. Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) currently has 650 members in over 40 chapters across the country. On Thursday, October 1st, SNaHP will lead over 30 universities across the country in a Medicare-for-All National Day of Action.

SNaHP will join together with members of the American Medical Student Association, WhiteCoats4BlackLives, the Latino Medical Student Association, Universities Allied for Essential Medicine, and the Pre-Health Dreamers in holding teach-ins, rallies, and candlelight vigils to remember the millions of people in our country who remain uninsured, underinsured and underserved by our current health care system.

There is already a Facebook page for the TenOne: Medicare for All Day of Action

I look forward to seeing this action and to seeing what these wonderful young people will bring to the practice of medicine. Perhaps medicine can, once again, be the practice of healing, not business.

[Warpy]

1. All my docs have told me we need single payer

although they've told me so rather furtively. This is not a controversial thing among most medical professionals. It's only when you get into suit territory that the resistance begins.

Leaving the cause of most of the health care problems in this country--the for profit insurance industry--in power is not going to work long term, although ending some of the worst abuses has helped.