INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR THE DEFENSE OF PEOPLE'S HEALTH

Today, January 14th, KWRU members participated in the International Forum for the Defense of People's Health organized by the People's Health Movement to coincide with the Fourth World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. The Forum has brought together more than 800 people from 45 countries, including people from community health organizations, peasant and workers' movements, health care professionals, UN health officials, health care advocates and manyothers to talk about the worldwide assault on health and health care by the free market and for-profit health care models.

Tara Colon, a forrmerly homeless mother and leader of the KWRU who is currently without health care for herself and her children, spoke to a crowd of more than five hundred people from around the world about the very real life and death situation in which millions of people in the US live without the right to health care. Even while our country has more than enough to go around, and while we have some of the best health care facilities in the world, millions go without and thousands die in this model of for-profit health care. She talked of the deadly conditions faced by people with no heat, by those living in vacant lots in tent cities, by those without water and without other basic necessities in the richest country in the world. She spoke of families with AIDS forced to live (and die) in shacks on vacant lots in tent cities built by the KWRU, because they had no other place to go, and she told the story of a man in Philadelphia who just days ago was found frozen to death in a house with no heat during a deadly cold snap. All of these are examples of a system which daily assaults the lives and health of large numbers of people, in which fewer and fewer people have a right to health. If this model doesn't work, if people are dying from for-profit health care in the US, why would it work anywhere in the world, she asked the audience of hundreds of people from countries suffering under privatization and similiar models worldwide.

In all of the sessions of the day, the devastating human cost of for-profit, private health care models, both in the rich countries and in the third world (where privatization and IMF policies have made the health situation worse) was clear.

In the evening cultural program, as songs and dances and stories from struggles and communities around the world were shared, Tara and Jen Cox of the KWRU/ PPEHRC taught "Rich Man's House." Together, hundreds of people united in a growing international movement for health, vowed to "go down to the rich man's house and take back what he stole from me...and not to allow any system to walk all over me."