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PAUL
GLOVER ESSAYS: community
control of food, fuel, housing, health care,
planning, education, finance. |
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by Paul Glover, Tikkun magazine,
2011
For 99 years the campaign for universal health coverage has relied on conferences, panel discussions, petitions and rallies. These vent moral indignation but lack power. Today, 51 million Americans without medical insurance and 30 million Americans paying for inadequate coverage will not get prompt affordable health care through polite legal means. That's because Congress and insurance companies are now significantly owned by multinational investment firms. Thus policy is made in remote board rooms that maximize profit and minimize people. These stuffed suits and their puppets have no concern for suffering Americans, slick advertisements notwithstanding. ![]() The League of Uninsured Voters (LUV) embraces the American tradition of rowdy confrontation that ended slavery, gained votes for women, won the eight-hour workday, pressed for social security, demanded civil rights, secured AIDS funding, and established the nation. Through LUV, we uninsured take leadership to expand Medicare to all. Liberal campaigns need our initiative, because moral indignation is less powerful than desperation. Richard Kirsch, director of Health Care for America Now said, "We would never want to organize the uninsured by themselves because Americans see the problem as affordability." (AP 4/11/09). We 50 million uninsured, though, see the problem as life or death. Our successful confrontations require calculating the needs and vulnerabilities of of insurers and their investors, in order to frustrate them until we win. There are several ways to damage profitability. Foremost, our liberal allies can withdraw money from stock markets and move it into regional economies and local banks-- especially into special funds for weatherization, solar power, local farms, microlending. The largest stockholders of medical insurance include Microsoft, Google, Apple, Chevron, Exxon, Cisco Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America. Such divestment is necessary for ending medical apartheid. Members of LUV do not petition Congress. We do not send them our signatures; we send them our medical bills. We enclose these with the note, "You voted against expanding Medicare, so you pay it." Likewise we send our medical bills to HMOs with the note "Your company lobbied against expanding Medicare, so you pay it." Millions of such letters yearly will clog the system. |
When
your family, friends or community are being violently squeezed by
greed, it's impolite to be polite. So here's more LUV member
action:![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() At the same time, LUV members build a new American health system. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Our actions will be nonviolent but as extreme as our situation. Is this class war? Yes. We didn't start it but we'll finish it. As billionaire Warren Buffett says, "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." Glover is founder of the League of Uninsured Voters, Ithaca Health Alliance, the Patch Adams Free Clinic, Ithaca HOURS local currency , Citizen Planners of Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Orchard Project and other programs; author of "Health Democracy: Liberating Americans from Medical Insurance" and of "A Crime Not a Crisis." |