'Toxic' Health Bill or No, Labor's 'Medicare for All' Activists Dig In

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2010/03/toxic-health-bill-or-no-labors-medicare-all-activists-dig

by Jane Slaughter | Wed, 03/10/2010 - 11:05am

When I told friends I was on my way to the Labor Campaign for Single-Payer conference, held last weekend, they all said, “I bet that’ll be a bunch of long faces.” I predicted not—these were people who’d always known the health care reform debate in Congress would come up short.


Participants at the Labor Campaign for Single Payer meeting wasted no time grousing about union leaders who set their sights on a public option presumed more viable. They got to work sharing tactics and discussing how to pass state-level bills. Claire McClinton (UAW, Flint, Michigan); Ray Kenny (IBEW, Portland, Oregon). Photo: Rand Wilson.


Even single-payer advocates didn’t know just how bad the bills would be, of course, but we knew that when the dust settled the insurance companies would still be in charge. “We’re making progress on single payer—the corporations want to make you the single payer,” said Chris Townsend, UE political director.

Yet the 124 delegates to the March 5-7 conference in Washington were upbeat. Despite the seemingly imminent passage of what campaign coordinator Mark Dudzic called a “bound-to-fail, toxic” proposal, they could point to big strides in popularizing the idea of Medicare for All:

* hundreds of presentations made to union and community groups, thousands of one-on-one conversations, and scores of demonstrations, produced by sturdy local coalitions like the Labor Taskforce for Universal Healthcare in Los Angeles and the statewide Healthcare4AllPa in Pennsylvania.

* attendance at town hall meetings last summer to confront Tea Party-ers

* dozens of arrests at insurance companies and other venues around the country

* 74 resolutions in favor of single-payer sent to the AFL-CIO convention last September, resulting in a pro-single-payer resolution there

* state single-payer bills in play this year in Pennsylvania, California, and Vermont.

Participants wasted no time moaning about the fact that most of their union leaders ignored single payer and set their sights on a public option that was presumed more viable. Instead they talked about how to pass state-level bills and shared specific tactics.

FULL story at link.