Dr. Oliver Fein, PNHP President, Dr. Margaret Flowers, PNHP Congressional Fellow, Mary Nichols-Rhodes, LPN and leader of the Single Payer Action Network in Ohio and also Ohio organizer of the Progressive Democrats of America in Ohio, spoke at a panel discussion on July 24 at the United National Peace Conference. We called our workshop “Health is a Human Right.”
Dr. Vic Sidel, longtime PNHP leader, Past President of the American Public Health Association, founder, past-president and current Member of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Past Co- President of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (among many other things!) was on the panel but got sidetracked by an issue with the train from New York City. I presented Vic’s excellent slides (hope I did OK, Vic!)
Thanks to the Sanctuary for Independent Media Dr. Flowers’ remarks, sharply edited, can be seen here and in full, unedited, here.
Dr. Fein presented thoughtful remarks that, alas, are not available online. He pointed out that as we go forward single payer advocates should reach out to supporters of the “public option,” people who acknowledge single payer as the best reform, but who lack the confidence that we will win it. We ought not demonize these friends, he proposed, but rather seek their support for single payer efforts. He also called for single payer advocates to reach out for allies from other struggles, like the peace movement, the immigrant rights movement and movement for women’s rights. Single payer has been a single issue movement, Dr. Fein concluded, and perhaps the time has come to see the inter-relatedness of our issues. For example: health care, not warfare.
Again, thanks to our friends at the Sanctuary for Independent Media you can link to a video of me saying something like this:
Agnes Smedley, in her great American autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, observes that
“‘Deserve’ is the word which the possessors use as a weapon against those they dispossess.”
Deserve.
In the the peace movement the word “deserve” reminds us of lines by Phil Ochs:
“Show me the country where bombs had to fall.”
and
“Is there anybody here who’d like to wrap a flag around an early grave?”
For our planet and all of its species there is no reason to say that anyone, any living thing, “deserves” war.
Yet more and more in the world we’re starting to understand, as Smedley wrote, that this question of who deserves is a really a question of who possesses. And we are learning to explain just how those who possess use their weapons against those whom they dispossess, war being the most dramatic example.
When we say that health is a human right we assert that everyone deserves the best chance at health. Everyone deserves good health or the effort to make personal health good.
But when we say so we’re challenging those who possess — those who hold that some people do not deserve health, that some do not deserve care. Those who possess would have us believe, even, that there are human beings who deserve suffering, deserve to be ill, deserve, even, to die, just as they say that some people, some places, deserve war.
There is an acute and worldwide struggle, connected to the wars, a struggle for health.
In the New York Times they call it “Payback Time,” a series of business articles that aims to show, among other things, that people, especially public employees in the United States and workers in Greece and across Europe, no longer deserve to retire.
Articles like these focus on deficits to tell us that people in Spain shouldn’t have public healthcare, that those in Britain should no longer have the National Health Service, that Canada needs more hospital closings, that in the United States, perhaps 65 years old is really too young to qualify for Medicare.
Here in the United States we have articulated a method of evidence to explain that the minimum step forward to improve our health, when it comes to the delivery of healthcare, is to implement a single payer national health insurance system. It is this scientific method that we in PNHP bring to the social movement.
Certainly we all have the need for a mass movement of people, the kind of emphasis that is the focus of this peace conference. Certainly we need moral persuasion – and we know that we have the weight of ethics on our side.
But we also need science. We need science to articulate exactly how it works that those who possess benefit from the dispossession of the poor, the victims of war and those who don’t get healthcare – how those who possess benefit from the suffering of others, suffering no one deserves.
We see the shocking examples in United States, from medical deportations to needless and preventable deaths to countless daily indignities that affect almost everyone who needs care and also everyone who provides care.
In the single payer movement we will explain that our cause is just. We know that we will never win without millions of people mobilized, standing for the idea that health as a human right.
But we have learned also to understand and explain these injustices and indignities with not only politics, but economics, policy and human outcomes. The single payer movement in general and PNHP in specific contributes a method, a method of evidence – social science – to the cause of peace and justice everywhere.