The following is a selection of the speeches delivered to a rally of medical and other health-professional students who support single-payer health reform that was held in the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier, Vt., on March 26. Some of the remarks have been shortened for space considerations. A video about the rally, which was attended by more than 200 people and which also heard speeches from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, is available here. To get more involved with student activism for single payer, write to organizer@pnhp.org.
Rishi Rattan
Surgery resident, Tufts Medical Center
Despite what is portrayed on āGrey’s Anatomy,ā as a training surgeon in an academic medical center in Boston, I spend much of my day filling out paperwork.
Recently, our oncology team fought to obtain approval for a 35-year-old mother of two to receive an operation that would quadruple her life expectancy. On the day of surgery, dressed in her gown, she was denied. When we finally received approval some months later, her aggressive tumor had spread. Her life expectancy dropped to months.
When we broke the news to her and her family, she asked us, gaze averted as if she knew the answer, whispering quietly so we had to lean in to hear her, “Doctor, would it have been different if you operated sooner?”
I have seen the cost in dollars and in life that a fractured health care system wreaks upon us. I have felt the power to heal wrested away from me by an incomplete infrastructure hampered by inequality and ever-expanding expenses.
Most of us follow the rhetorical battles on health care reform with fervor and interest. But I am rudely reminded daily of the tangible effects of our hopelessly inadequate, costly health care system. Health care spending here has doubled in less than a decade. Do you suppose this will get better without intervention from Vermont’s citizens?
As physicians sworn to advocate for patients, we are obligated to find a solution to this unsustainable and unjust status quo. This bureaucratic structure prevents me from being bedside in my patients’ time of need. Instead of spending more time with our patients under a simplified health system with a single payer, we rush out of the clinic rooms, knowing that our true battle will not be against the parasitic disease eroding away at life inside our patients, but against the parasitic insurance companies eroding away at our ability to fight disease.
Vermont is on the cusp of living up to its motto: freedom and unity. Freedom to choose a comprehensive system that provides all Vermonters the highest level of health. To obtain this, we need unity. All under one single-payer system. Unity here. Now.
You, me, doctor, patient, we must unite and rise up from under foot. We must throw off our bloated, wasteful system and cry out in one voice that thunders through these halls of power. We must unite against a system that forces us to struggle out of arm’s reach of a cure. We must unite against a system that siphons our hard-earned money to for-profit coffers. We must unite against a system that forces physicians to tell our patients that they cannot receive the same treatment as their next door neighbor because of their insurance! We, united, must fight for a single-payer system that treats all of us equally.
Just as I have a duty as a physician to fight for the best possible health for all my patients, you, Vermonters, have a duty to fight for freedom and unity, under one plan that covers all!
Connie Yip
Columbia University School of Nursing
I am honored to be with such a committed group of medical students, nursing students, health care professionals, and supporters of single payer. The fact that we have people who traveled across state lines, to stand up for single payer, in the cold, freezing, is a testament to our determination to change the current U.S. health care system. This is where you cheer. Whooo!
Okay, so why am I here? My parents owned a Chinese restaurant while I was growing up. We didnāt have health insurance. Team sports were discouraged because my parents didnāt want my siblings and me to get hurt. When I was 5, I dropped a 5 lb. can of bamboo shoots on my thumb. The gash across my thumb reached my bone and instead of getting stitches, my parents used rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip to clean my wound and I healed ānaturally.ā
So yes, I believe that health care is a human right. As a nursing student and future nurse and nurse practitioner, it would be tremendously gratifying for me to take part in changing the health care system and providing families like mine with health care.
Currently, U.S. health care is for-profit and focuses on the bottom line. We are the only industrialized nation to have a health care system that has a for-profit business model. Why donāt other countries follow our example? Hmmm, let me think about that. Well, for starters, patient care is compromised when you have a system that answers to stockholders instead of the public. For instance, insurance companies avoid the sick, expensive people, cover the healthy, and deny paying for expensive procedures, etc. When health care is run like a business, profits come first and patients come later. A for-profit health care system discriminates and is only accountable to stockholders, not to anyone else.
So whatās the answer? You all know the answer; letās say it together at the count of three: 1-2-3, single payer!
Thank you Vermont!
George āBudā Vana
University of Vermont College of Medicine
Welcome to Vermont. On behalf of all of my fellow Vermont Med students here, I want to say thank you for caring about what is happening in Vermont as much as we do. It is great to know that this small state can attract this much attention once again!
We have had a lot of firsts in the history of Vermont to be proud of. Along with being an independent Republic for a few years before becoming the first new state to join the United States, we also have many firsts related to social justice: we were the first state to outlaw slavery, the first state to allow civil unions, and now Vermont is the first state to truly take on health care reform, moving toward making access to affordable health care a civil right.
These ready-to-be-first-kind-of-Vermonters are the ones who hired Dr. William Hsiao to analyze our health care system and propose a single-payer option, and they are the ones who elected Governor Shumlin on the platform of enacting a single-payer system.
Forty to fifty years ago, young Americans from all over the East Coast trickled into Vermont to escape the negative social values which they saw developing in their respective cities and states, to come back-to-the-land here in Vermont, where they saw the potential to live alongside people who shared this independent and socially conscious mindset.
When Vermont passes a single-payer system, I believe we will see energetic young physicians and nurses like you come back-to-the-patient as they move to our small state. This back-to-the-patient generation of health care professionals will replace the retiring baby-boomers and take care of them, and bring with them the same kind of exciting new ideas which helped energize Vermont in the 1970s.
I predict that in 10 yearsā time, our back-to-the-patient movement will show the rest of the country that when you take the administrative and payment mess out of health care and enable better coordination of care among health providers — people will be healthier and it will cost you much less money.
Iām putting on this hard-hat in order to say that right now this single-payer bill is under construction. Itās not perfect and probably wonāt take effect for a few years. But it does represent one of the many exciting changes to health care in this state.
This hard-hat also symbolizes the fact that there will be obstacles — falling objects, ladders, bricks — in our way. Albert Schweitzer once said: āThose who do good should not expect people to clear the stones from their path on this account. They must expect the contrary: that others will roll great boulders down upon them. Such obstacles can be overcome only by the kind of strength gained in the very struggle. Those who merely resent obstacles will waste whatever force they have.ā
There will be boulders in our path to change, but we are the ones who will inherit what is now a broken even more-boulder-filled system. We must applaud and support what these Vermont citizen-legislators are doing right now and remember that when you, who have made the pledge to practice here, come back to Vermont, you are not coming back to Vermont because of a single-payer system ā you have come to get back-to-the-patient.
Nurse Practitioner and Student
Boston University School of Public Health
I am a nurse practitioner and a student of public health in Boston.
I am here today to talk about health care as a right, not as a commodity. When we realize that health care is a right, we also realize that health insurance is a business — a business that maximizes profits by denying you health care, a business with a track record of calling pregnancy a pre-existing condition, of paying their CEOs multimillion-dollar salaries, and of bankrupting people when they are at their sickest.
My patient Bob learned this lesson firsthand.
Bob is a hard working man who joined a union right out of high school and once went seven years without taking a single week of vacation. But Bob also contracted hepatitis C. Now, 20 years later, he is dying of cirrhosis and was told that he has two more months to live. He was also told by his insurance company that he has no place to die.
Because of his illness, Bob hasnāt been able to work for the past few years. Because heās not working, he no longer has private health insurance. Because heās only 42, he isnāt old enough for Medicare — the system he paid into all his life through his taxes. And instead he only has basic Medicaid which does not pay for end-of-life care.
Clearly Bob does not benefit from this situation, so who does?
Bobās old insurance company. While Bob was young and healthy he paid thousands of dollars for years to this insurance company through his union. They have made a substantial profit on Bob because once he lost his job his insurance company relinquished all responsibility. It could not have worked out better for them.
I am here today to talk about health care as a right, not as a consumer product. When we realize that health care is a right, we also realize that lives matter more than profit margins.
Right now the market controls what care we receive. Does the market care about bankrupting elders? Does the market care that only large corporations can afford to buy health insurance for their employees? Does the market care if Bob dies homeless on the street? No. The market only cares about making money — as the insurance industry has proven decade after decade.
But we the people care. We care about our communities, our elders, those struggling to make ends meet. And because we care about lives instead of profit margins, we should be in control, not market forces.
Single payer gives us that control. Single payer acknowledges that the market cannot meet the needs of the people, that human lives are not the same as flat screen TVs or cars or any other consumer product. When insurance companies control the money for health care, that money can end up in someone elseās pocket, like we saw in Bobās situation. When single payer controls the money for health care, that money will continue to work for you, even if you lose your job. That money will never turn into million-dollar salaries, wasteful marketing or departments with the sole purpose of issuing denials.
Letās take back control of our health care through single-payer reform!
Stanton Shek
Dartmouth Medical School
Hello my fellow, future, health care professionals,
I am in awe of this amazing demonstration of support for Vermontās initiative to pass single payer. Weāve come from all over the country, traveled hundreds of miles, and missed out on precious studying time to send a message to Vermonters and their government representatives. Lead the country in establishing health care for all and choose to enact single payer!
Show us how health care is done right! Show us a health care system that is equal! Show us an uncomplicated health care system.
End the confusion of which procedure or medication is covered or not covered under which plan. End the headaches that providers get when they are navigating their patients through the labyrinths of their health insurance plans. End the concern that people feel that they might not make it through with their health, financial security and sanity.
When we all graduate from our respective schools within the next few years, we will inherit this health care system. We will inherit all the patients of America. We will inherit their problems whether that is sicknesses or their inability to pay for medical care. I support single payer now as medical student, and Iām sure everyone else in this room too, because weāre taking ownership of our future responsibility now. We are giving the signal that this is how we want to practice our medicine!
So Vermont: Set the example and raise the bar on health care in America by passing single payer. You have our support and also the support of the hundreds of other future health care providers back at our homes.
Make Vermont the best state to practice medicine! Thank you!