Health Care is a Human Right - Build a Movement for Just Health Care, Now!®
By Ethel Long-Scott, Executive Director,
Women's Economic Agenda Project
June 24, 2004

It's great to be here from California to talk about the upcoming August 30 historic march to focus attention on the shameful health care crisis in our nation. The growing cancer of inadequate health care, like the escalation of poverty and the increasing neglect of poor women and their families, cannot be separated from this country's largest and most important UNdeclared war, the war on its poor, which is killing its working people. We are gathered today because we have a better vision, a vision of an America where there is good health care for everyone, where everyone enjoys the most basic economic and human rights, an America FREE, from addiction, homelessness, hunger, joblessness, violence & poverty! We are going to march because we will not rest until that vision is won!

The women that I work with, jobless and low wage workers, are encouraged that the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign has organized this press event to bring attention to the "Faces of the Fallen," the many Americans who are suffering, rejected, unemployed, homeless and without access to the critical health care that would ease some of their suffering. As we move towards August 30th, we should be mindful that we are in this awful predicament because the wealthiest corporations and individuals have used their money to commandeer our government, and keep it from being of the people, by the people and for the people.

Everyone here knows the enormity of the crisis, and the shame that the richest country in the world can't do better by its workers. In June Families USA made official what many of us already knew. More than 81 million people went without health insurance for at least a month in 2002 and 2003. That's almost a third of all Americans under 65. And behind each one of those 81 million people, there is a horror story of economic hardship that doesn't get told, doesn't get projected out into the arena for public discussion because the fact that so many people are suffering so much all of the time doesn't qualify as news.

Countless millions more who do have some kind of insurance will be denied necessary care, will sacrifice other basic necessities like heat and rent in order to pay hospital and insurance bills, will be forced into bankruptcy, will live in fear that they are one health emergency away from being homeless, hungry and destitute. The employer-based, for-profit health system we keep tinkering with has had many more than three strikes. It should be Out! We are clear that there is no substitute for a national health care system that is federally-mandated, single-payer, and universal -everyone is covered. We found that people are tired of paying for our current broken system with our lives and the lives of our families. The time is now for a universal health care system where the health of all human beings is valued and affirmed! We looked for such a system - and we found one! It's a national health insurance plan called, Just Health Care for All.

We want to bring about needed changes in health care, so we need to build a working relationship across color lines. And we need to build it by spreading a vision of what is possible, and what is right. With a program of solutions we can rally the multitudes disgusted by the tired, weak, and inadequate proposals from both major parties. As we go forward toward the "March for Our Lives," I am reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King, who just before he was killed in 1968 began switching his focus from civil rights to economic rights. When Dr. King had that idea, it scared a lot of the people around him. They didn't see how you could fight poverty. They saw poverty everywhere. Dr. King was killed before he could get that poor people's movement fully organized. But the idea of a poor people's movement wouldn't die because it really was the answer. And so it's up to us to pick up where Dr. King left off. The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign is building a movement that unites the poor across color lines. The PPEHRC is committed to uniting the poor as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty everywhere and forever. With your help we can create a groundswell for what we know is right. We urge you to affiliate with the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC), organize delegations to join the PPEHRC in the March for Our Lives on August 30, make a pledge to return home and build strong local, state, and regional Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. For more information visit our website www.economichumanrights.org

Please join this effort by sending in your stories and photos about the fight for basic human rights in this country.