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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2007Defying governor for California healthcareOakland, Cal.—Many neighborhood meetings are being held all across California supporting SB 840, the California Universal Healthcare Act. This bill passed last year, but Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed it. There is a push to get it passed again. We attended one of those meetings here on July 15, where a hundred people came to hear nurses from California Nurses Association recount their experiences with the broken healthcare system, offer their analysis of the problem—private insurance companies, who need to deny care to make a profit—and offer their insight into why only a single-payer system makes sense. Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” has provided a new impetus to discuss the problems with healthcare in the U.S. nationwide. Each nurse testified to how the movie reflected their experiences with patients. Much of the economic analysis boiled down to the slogan, “Healthcare YES, Insurance companies NO.” The campaign for SB 840 has as its motto a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which shows how prescient he was: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Any law that keeps capitalism intact will neither fully solve the problems of inequality nor address how capitalist commodity production distorts any human service like healthcare. Yet when workers fight for a law like this it reflects many years of struggle over alienation in the workplace. —Urszula Wislanka |
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