July, 2006

California Truth Commission Shows the Way to Health Care

By Ethel Long-Scott, Women's Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) & California Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign

Truth Commission on health care as a human right. PHOTO/AUSTIN LONG-SCOTT

OAKLAND, Calif.--We called it a "Truth Commission" about our broken health care system, because we wanted people who have the most trouble getting good health care -- low-income workers, nohealth- care workers, workers who can't find jobs -- to testify about the kind of health care they need.

They came to Oakland on March 25 and, as the other stories on this page and the next show, they told heart-breaking horror stories about the damage done and the lives lost by a health care system that refuses to put people ahead of profits -- horror stories you would hear in every part of the country if Truth Commissions were held everywhere. Their testimony was a damning indictment of a health care system too dysfunctional to be called civilized -- 7 to 11 million people in California alone who go without health insurance for some part of the year. People who work hard every day and still can't afford health insurance. Even workers with union contracts are seeing their health insurance weakened. The testifiers made it clear that employers are destroying the old social contract, under which workers could expect to get ahead in exchange for their hard work.

We are facing war being waged on working and poor people on all the major social justice issues, not just health care. The people who own companies are determined to pay workers as little as they can get away with, regardless of the harm it does. They can do this because we have no class rights as working people. Every day the truth about our suffering -- truths voiced so painfully but eloquently in Truth Commission testimony -- is silenced or snuffed out. Major studies show our health care system is too broken to be fixed. It must be replaced with something better. The latest two-year study of the nation's hospital emergency rooms found emergency medical care is near collapse, with the nation's declining number of emergency rooms dangerously overcrowded and often unable to treat seriously ill people in a safe and efficient manner. Many Truth Commission witnesses told horror stories about bad emergency care.

Most elected leaders in government do not have the will to fight for what we really need, a universal health care system that includes everyone and leaves nobody out. Popular proposed solutions such as the Massachusetts Plan leave out tens of thousands of the uninsured, punish some of the people who need the most help and emphasize profitmaking health insurance when what we need is affordable health care.

Both major political parties support the Massachussetts Plan and other inadequate legislation because they keep trying to protect the people who make big profits from other people's misery. Our Truth Commission judges who evaluated the testimony determined that only a "single-payer system" of universal health care will eliminate unnecessary administrative costs and excess private profits.

How do we get our health care rights if our leaders don't have the courage to fight for them? We workers have to do it ourselves, just as women had to fight for their equality, workers had to fight for the eight-hour day and job safety, and African Americans and other non-whites had to fight for their rights.

With Hurricane Katrina, with the tens of thousands of workers recently laid off at Delphi and General Motors and other major corporations, with major airlines trying to stop paying pensions to their retirees, we see how expendable workers are. Only when we come together as workers, as the poor workers did in the immigrant rights demonstrations, look out for each other's interests and develop new priorities that will uplift all of us can we strike a blow for justice together. The Truth Commission made it clear that we must build a people's movement for single payer and universal healthcare starting with the poorest among us.

The fight for healthcare must also be a fight to eliminate poverty, a fight to win the power to establish our own priorities and a fight to win and protect human rights policies for all working and poor people.