Hundreds of demonstrators gathered to demand health care for all on Thursday, June 16. Single Payer Now, a grass-roots advocacy group, spearheaded the “Medicare for All – End Private Insurance” rally, coinciding with a health care industry convention taking place at the Moscone Center.
It was a sunny and warm morning as a diverse group of volunteers gathered and police set up temporary barricades on the sidewalk.
Meanwhile, attendees for America’s Health Insurance Plans convention, wearing suits and toting briefcases, swiftly but casually entered the building. The AHIP is the national trade association representing the health insurance industry and its members include powerful lobbyists in Sacramento and Washington.
The rally’s mood, though energetic and impassioned, was polite and peaceful. Chants of “Medicare Yes! Insurance Companies No!” could be heard as passing drivers honked their horns in support of the demonstration.
“We need to need to stay and fight,” said Tom Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council. “It’s a civil liberties rights issue.”
Though some make the argument that a government-run health system will only worsen the quality of health care, Paulson said that choice between government and private health care is a no-brainer.
“Look, if I had a choice between the private insurance companies and our representatives in government, I would go with the government in four seconds,” he said. “Private insurance companies and the corporations in the United States are doing everything they can to make sure that all power is in their hands. One of the finest examples of that is how the basic right to health care is still inaccessible to millions and millions of Americans because the corporations control it.”
Dr. Hank Abrons, president of Physicians for a National Health Plan-California, said that most doctors want universal medical care instead of money for health care being “put in the hands of people on Wall Street.”
Annie Flores with the Women’s Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) in Oakland showed up to support the rally and get the word out. She says that most of the work WEAP does is health care advocacy for women of color and the elderly, who care for the sick but are also sick themselves and have no health care.
“A lot of our black and brown women are sick taking care of the sick,” she said. “What we have now is elderly care for the elderly.”
Former republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 810 — the California bill for single payer healthcare — thee times, and Flores doesn’t think that Jerry Brown’s administration will be much different.
“At the end of the day, you are dealing with big time lobbyists here in California compared to our grass roots organizing…the last 10 years brought a lot of sophistication to the Democrats,” she said. “And labor and grassroots? As much they pretend we are included, we’re not.”
Though Flores doesn’t have much hope for the immediate future, she stressed how important it was to keep moving forward.
“We need to keep up the fight, keep the light going,” she said. “We need to keep talking about it.”
