Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I started showing up at Liberty Square a few days after the occupation began. I was living in New York and working on single-payer universal health care and had been doing that for about four years. I had basically come to the
realization that the political process was broken, that in order to have any
sort of fair debate about how to provide health care to people in this country we would have to have some serious change in the political process and in the influence that corporations have over that process. I had followed the debate of the biggest players—the
pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the insurance companies making a law
that would benefit their interest and not the people or the people’s health.
Anytime we tried to insert our message, we ran into brick walls. I was actually
arrested in Congress in 2009 trying to get Max Baucus to let doctors and nurses
testify on behalf of the need for a universal health care system.
The tactic of camping out and occupying a space had been used
in New York City and other places before Occupy Wall Street started. There was the Bloombergville demonstration at City Hall a year prior. I was excited to see people coming
together, but I didn’t quite see how I fit in until there was a movement
happening. It was so exciting. I showed up with friends of mine, and we started
to navigate through the aspects of what it would look like to have a specific
working group around healthcare, and we started Health Care for the 99%. We supported the work of the medic tent. We helped with supplies. When we did engage people
who were medical professionals or had some kind of training, we would make sure
that they knew that the medic tent was always looking for volunteers. We also worked
on the more political aspect of the health care system that’s dominated by
corporate interests. We raised awareness around that.Just looking at the signs people had at Zuccotti Park showed how important health care was to people there. I remember a woman holding a sign that said, “The dogs I walk
have health insurance, but I don’t.” We had a pretty tremendous response from
the beginning on the issue of health care.
We had a really active working group that met weekly, sometimes more than weekly for more than a year. We’re still around, but there aren’t regular meetings. We will come together as Health Care for the 99% when we can. We had founded the group in late September of 2011. A few weeks later, we called for a demonstration on health insurance companies to protest their greed and their denial of care to people, and we had five hundred people show up for this demonstration, and we marched for a while. Across the street from Liberty Square is a Blue Cross Blue Shield office, which is a subsidiary of the largest private health insurance company in the country, so we started there and marched up to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It had been closed a few years ago to be turned into luxury condos, leaving the lower west side without a hospital, which is really a public health crisis in New York City—to have that much space without an emergency room to help people. That hospital had such a long history of being a part of the community. It was really devastating to see that kind of decision made, seeing something people so desperately need to have in their community taken away from them, turned into the last thing that we need more of in this city, which is more condos.
The hospital closing issue is still going on, and people in our group are still very involved with that. There are hospitals being closed in Brooklyn illegally. In addition to that, we had speak-outs for consciousness-raising. We would come together, and people would step forward and share their health care testimonial. It was such a powerful process. We still have this network of people that continue to work in some capacity with health care. Doctors, nurses and health professional have been involved. There have been existing groups in New York for some time, like the New York State Nurses Association and National Nurses United, who are hugely important for getting energy going. There’s also Physicians for a National Health Program and Health Care Now. They’ve all been working on this issue, but Occupy helped to solidify and bring a lot of people together that hadn’t been working together. It was an important time.
We had a really active working group that met weekly, sometimes more than weekly for more than a year. We’re still around, but there aren’t regular meetings. We will come together as Health Care for the 99% when we can. We had founded the group in late September of 2011. A few weeks later, we called for a demonstration on health insurance companies to protest their greed and their denial of care to people, and we had five hundred people show up for this demonstration, and we marched for a while. Across the street from Liberty Square is a Blue Cross Blue Shield office, which is a subsidiary of the largest private health insurance company in the country, so we started there and marched up to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It had been closed a few years ago to be turned into luxury condos, leaving the lower west side without a hospital, which is really a public health crisis in New York City—to have that much space without an emergency room to help people. That hospital had such a long history of being a part of the community. It was really devastating to see that kind of decision made, seeing something people so desperately need to have in their community taken away from them, turned into the last thing that we need more of in this city, which is more condos.
The hospital closing issue is still going on, and people in our group are still very involved with that. There are hospitals being closed in Brooklyn illegally. In addition to that, we had speak-outs for consciousness-raising. We would come together, and people would step forward and share their health care testimonial. It was such a powerful process. We still have this network of people that continue to work in some capacity with health care. Doctors, nurses and health professional have been involved. There have been existing groups in New York for some time, like the New York State Nurses Association and National Nurses United, who are hugely important for getting energy going. There’s also Physicians for a National Health Program and Health Care Now. They’ve all been working on this issue, but Occupy helped to solidify and bring a lot of people together that hadn’t been working together. It was an important time.
Occupy helped to bring attention to the deep inequality in the country. The majority of the people have been
so left out of the process and so marginalized. Anytime we can model
and put into motion alternative ways of living or organizing ourselves is a really important exercise in thinking about developing another world,
which is probably going to be a reality for us at some point. A lot of people
talk about the unsustainability of our lifestyle. There are probably going to
be some big changes because it’s not possible to continue our way of life forever. I
think it's really important that people come together and really imagine alternative ways of
existing that don’t rely on capitalism.
In the United States, unlike any other developed
industrialized countries, we rely on a totally commoditized health care system.
We have rationing based on if you can pay for health care. If you can’t pay
for it, then you’re not going to get it. We do have programs to assist people
who might have trouble paying, but they are very limited. It’s very hard to be
eligible. There’s inconsistency and restrictions in care. The kind of profits
being made off of health care, off of sick people, are huge, and that in and of
itself is a totally moral crisis. Just the morality of the health care system, the fact that it’s based on requiring payment in order to receive care from the
individual to the provider is immoral, but there’s also the economic crisis, which is that we spend twice as much as any other country on health care,
but we get so much less. We have huge numbers of people who are totally
uninsured. Even after the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare is implemented, they
are estimating around 30 million people will remain uninsured. In addition, we
will have a new growing concept of underinsured, which is people who have
insurance and pay a lot of money for this insurance but still can’t afford to
use that insurance because of the financial barrios—co-pays, huge deductables.
All of those things really add up, and people are going to have a really difficult time making ends meet even though they supposedly have this insurance, which is supposed to protect you from bankruptcy and guarantee that you get the health care you need when you need it, but private health insurance doesn’t do either. About 60% of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. When most of those people filed for bankruptcy, they had health insurance. That problem isn’t going to go away, unfortunately, even with the changes that we’re seeing to the health care system through Obamacare. There’s an increase in consolidation of corporate power within the health care system. I hear the expression that patients are treated more and more like widgets as electronic medical records are utilized. The way it’s being implemented is that the doctor or the nurse is so engrossed in a database and entering information into a computer that they’re not even looking at the patient to see what’s going on with them.
That’s not good health care. People will have to think about alternative means of caring for themselves, quite frankly. We just won’t be able to get it form the system. We need to think creatively about how we make sure it’s still available to people. For me personally, I have a $15,000 annual deductible for my family, so we ration care all of the time, and it resets every year. We are so on the brink of bankruptcy should we ever have a serious illness. Our insurance works best for us when we don’t use it, so we just try to avoid using it as much as possible. I’m a student in Public Health, so I don’t do a lot of direct care service, but I know that there are a lot of doctors and nurses who can tell you a new story everyday about how the lack of insurance or the restrictions of a private health insurance company have hurt the patient, either by delaying the care that they need, costing too much or lack of insurance preventing them the care that they need totally.
All of those things really add up, and people are going to have a really difficult time making ends meet even though they supposedly have this insurance, which is supposed to protect you from bankruptcy and guarantee that you get the health care you need when you need it, but private health insurance doesn’t do either. About 60% of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. When most of those people filed for bankruptcy, they had health insurance. That problem isn’t going to go away, unfortunately, even with the changes that we’re seeing to the health care system through Obamacare. There’s an increase in consolidation of corporate power within the health care system. I hear the expression that patients are treated more and more like widgets as electronic medical records are utilized. The way it’s being implemented is that the doctor or the nurse is so engrossed in a database and entering information into a computer that they’re not even looking at the patient to see what’s going on with them.
That’s not good health care. People will have to think about alternative means of caring for themselves, quite frankly. We just won’t be able to get it form the system. We need to think creatively about how we make sure it’s still available to people. For me personally, I have a $15,000 annual deductible for my family, so we ration care all of the time, and it resets every year. We are so on the brink of bankruptcy should we ever have a serious illness. Our insurance works best for us when we don’t use it, so we just try to avoid using it as much as possible. I’m a student in Public Health, so I don’t do a lot of direct care service, but I know that there are a lot of doctors and nurses who can tell you a new story everyday about how the lack of insurance or the restrictions of a private health insurance company have hurt the patient, either by delaying the care that they need, costing too much or lack of insurance preventing them the care that they need totally.
I would like to see a world that meets human needs, where we
think logically about how to use our resources collectively, where we can imagine a
way of exchanging services not based on a monetary foundation, where we realize that there are
other ways to measure human experience and enhance our lives and make us be
full human beings living with dignity. For me, what it would feel like is the energy that I put in,
the work that I do would be rewarded by society. I wouldn't have to choose between rent or health insurance. I wouldn't have to make a decision to skip a meal, so that I
can pay my electric bill. These kinds of choices would be eliminated, and
there would be a fair system rewarding people on the work they do. That
includes things that we consider work now and things that we don’t. Women, for example, raise up an entire generation of people in this country for free. I
imagine that there would be a more fair social contract with the people around
us, and that could take a lot of different shapes. It’s more about the
principles of fairness and not ignoring the work we do
to exist and be part of a society. For me, it would mean that I would have
more time and less stress. Maybe I could create things. I love to paint. I
like to garden, and I rarely get to do the things that I most want to do. People
would be able to pursue their actual interests. Occupy made me realize that I should value the parts of my life in ways that society may not.
Another world IS possible.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Another world IS possible.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/