by the Editors
On October 8, seven demonstrators were arrested at the Chicago offices of Cigna Insurance. The protests are part of a series begun in New York last week and slated to spread to at least ten cities next week including Washington DC.
"Single payer is inevitable; it’s going to happen," said Kevin Zeese of Prosperity Agenda, one of the nationwide initiators of the campaign. "The question is when." Those who want to make it happen, he added, can sign up at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.com . Just under 700 have already volunteered to risk arrest to make Medicare For All, the only workable plan for universal health care, a near-term reality.
The seven participants walked into the lobby and demanded to speak with the CEO of Cigna, demanding immediate approval of all doctor-recommended treatments. When access was refused, they sat down in the lobby of the building, Chanting "patients, not profits," and "Cigna is the real death panel." They put themselves on the line for people who die every day because an insurance company denies them the care that they need, and are calling for real reform, which eliminates the real cause of the health care crisis in our country, the insurance companies.
Participants in the rally outside the health insurance office included Mary E. Flowers, State Representative of the 31st district, and Midge Hough, a Chicago resident whose daughter-in-law Jenny died five weeks ago as a result of inadequate care. Jenny was seven and a half months pregnant and diagnosed with acute pneumonia. Carrying a sign with a picture of Jenny on it, Hough encourages others to stand up for quality health care for all.
"We lost Jennifer, and we lost our grandchild. She can't speak up for herself anymore, but I'm going to speak for Jennifer," said Hough while standing outside the Cigna office. "Tomorrow is her memorial service or I would have been one of the people sitting inside... This is the richest country in the world and my daughter in law and my grandchild died, and I can't accept that."
Insurance companies, with their advertising and lobbying budgets, their profits, lavish executive compensation, dividends, and vast billing and denial bureaucracies consume a third of every health care dollar. The health insurance reform proposals favored by the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress protect the profits of insurance companies at the expense of patients and the public.
The principle that corporations have a legal right to their profts while the sick and injured have no particular right to health care is so well established in US law and custom that another insurance company in Maine confidently sued that state , claiming in court that increased profts were just that --- its legal right. The custom that keeps us from laughing claims like this out of court can only be a barbaric and backward one, and the edifice of and the edifice of law that bolsers it can only be unjust law.
Someone dies every 12 minutes in the US beacuse of lack of health care. Two thirds of a million bankruptcies were filed last year because of unpayable medical bills. Uncounted numbers who do have insurance cannot afford to use it to visit doctors or buy meds. There was a time when people disobeyed unjust laws to give truth body and wings, to bring justice into being. Maybe we need to make that time this time.
The Chicago Single Payer Action Network were the people on the ground who carried out this action. To hook up with activists in your own city or town, to contribute bail money, legal defense or other support, visit www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org.
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Shaquille Fontenot is a co-chair of the National Network on Cuba and a co-founder of the Low Country Action Committee in Charleston, South Carolina.
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