Much of the credit goes to union members who have mobilized to take back the town halls from the campaign of misinformation being waged by extremist groups, some backed by corporate donors and fueled with talking points from extremist Republicans.
Members of the nation’s labor unions have made up a hefty segment of the audiences that flocked to town halls Mr. Obama held in the past week, and they have played an even larger role in a nationwide campaign for an insurance overhaul. Financially, and with boots on the ground, unions have become the backbone of the president’s effort.
The Times quotes Troy Goodson, a member of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 969 in Grand Junction, Colo., who explained why health care reform is needed. Goodson, 55, said he has triplets at home, and their hospital delivery costs alone would have left him underwater financially had he lacked adequate insurance. He said he’s glad to see union members out in force, pushing for the president’s plan.
He told the Times:
The big corporations and the insurance industry, they’re lobbying 24/7. Someone has to fight against that.
And we are fighting back in a big way.
When President Obama held a town hall meeting in Helena, Mont., the crowd inside reached about 1,300, many of them union members. Outside, another 1,100 people rallied for and against reform. The Montana State AFL-CIO reports that 700 of the 1,100 were union members and pro-health care reform supporters, outnumbering opponents by about two to one.
Montana union members came by bus from Missoula, Billings and Great Falls to the town hall, followed in each case by long car pool caravans. One caravan came from Havre, which is on the Canadian border, about a five-hour drive away from Helena.
In Mason City, Iowa, between 50 and 60 people were turned away from a health care reform town hall meeting hosted by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) because of fire code concerns. So many people came to the meeting that they couldn’t all fit into the room where the town hall was scheduled.
That was not the case in Nashville, Tenn., where only one anti-health care reform opponent showed up at a protest on Friday. According to the Associated Press, Tom Kovach, state director of America’s Independent Party, said he’d hoped to see at least 50 people at the protest.
Instead, the only company he had was a handful of reporters and a few passing joggers. Kovach acknowledged that Friday was school students’ first day back and that protesters may have wanted to be “cautious,” considering the group was criticized for protesting near the school.
In Nebraska, some 40 people rallied in downtown Omaha Saturday afternoon to show their support for health care change. The rally was part of AFSCME’s “Highway to Health Care” tour, which will stop in 21 cities over three weeks. It was organized by AFSCME and the AFL-CIO. The tour also traveled to the state capitol in Lincoln on Sunday.
It seems that anti-worker forces are not only using the town halls to oppose health care reform but also are taking aim at the Employee Free Choice Act. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has sent out a list of town hall meetings and is encouraging its members to show up and speak out against the bill, which, according to NAM, says “that any version of the [Employee Free Choice Act] is unacceptable to manufacturers.”
Here is a report and analysis of another rally of working people. This time it was thousands of desperate working people seeking some immediate relief for medical problems that other privatized systems had denied and failed to provide.
Thousands line up at Los Angeles free clinic
Healthcare and the social crisis in America
17 August 2009
Patrick Martin
(follow link to read entire article:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a17.shtml
A tidal wave of suffering and human need has been on display this week at a free healthcare clinic inside a Los Angeles-area sports arena. Just as the New Orleans Superdome, packed with refugees from Hurricane Katrina, shocked the world in 2005, the scene in Inglewood, California gives a glimpse of the social crisis devastating America. And it could be multiplied, a thousand times over, in every city, suburb and rural district of the United States, as deepening unemployment and spreading homelessness exacerbate what was already a vast unmet need for healthcare services.
Thousands of uninsured workers and their families have flocked to the Forum at Inglewood since Tuesday, seeking free medical and dental care from a group of volunteer doctors, dentists and nurses. The Forum, formerly the suburban home of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, became for a week the site of the largest free medical clinic in American history.
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According to local press accounts, among those seeking help at the clinic were:
• A homeless man who camped outside in order to get glasses
• An unemployed grocery clerk needing a root canal
• A laid-off auto mechanic with back pain
• A laid-off office worker uninsured for two years
• A cancer patient who had exhausted her benefits under her HMO plan
• A community college student with sinus problems and blurred vision
• A laid-off security guard who needed glasses
• An unemployed grocery clerk with a toothache
• A woman whose children are covered under the state Medi-Cal plan but lacks insurance for herself
• A county government worker whose dental insurance deductibles were too high to afford treatment for her husband and three-year-old daughter
• A retired welder who lost his coverage while he was in the middle of getting dentures
• A couple, both employed, who between them needed dentures, a general physical, a breast exam and a pap smear
• A diabetic amputee who could not afford to buy needed drugs
• A retiree needing an X-ray for a lung problem
• A 70-year-old Vietnam vet who put off a root canal for two years because the VA hospital was overwhelmed with more urgent cases
• A 63-year-old woman who received her first new pair of glasses in five years
• A 46-year-old woman who had an abnormal pap smear last year but was unable to follow up because Medi-Cal denied her coverage.
Carol Meyer, a top official of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, visited the Forum and drew the obvious lesson, telling reporters: “The current system of healthcare in the United States is broken.” Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez called the lines outside the Forum, “the perfect distillation of an unconscionable societal failure.”
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But the goal of Obama’s pro-corporate healthcare restructuring is to increase the financial health of American capitalism, not to improve the physical health of the American people. Hence his overriding emphasis on the need to cut healthcare spending, in order to reduce labor costs and improve the competitive position of corporate America.
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As opposed to the fake alternatives presented by the Obama administration—either his reactionary healthcare program or the status quo—the working class must demand an end to medicine-for-profit, and the establishment of free healthcare for all, as a basic human right, to be provided at public expense.”
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