Penn ACTION and our Executive Director, Marc Stier, led the Health Care For America Campaign in Pennsylvania, which was critical to enacting the Affordable Care Act in Washington. Here is an overview of the strategy and achievements of the biggest issue campaign in Pennsylvania history—Health Care For America Now.
We mobilized Congressional champions for healthcare reform. Some of our members of the House—such as Allyson Schwartz, Bob Brady, Chaka Fattah, Joe Sestak, and Mike Doyle—and Senator Casey were long time supporters of health care reform. But in Washington, there is a huge step between an abstract commitment to some ideal and the hard, slogging work of moving legislation through Congress.
So first task was to light a fire under potential champions for health care reform. This began during the election of 2008. We focused the election on the health care issue. And together with HCAN groups in 42 other states, we secured the support of Congressional supporters of our statement of principles and then built a huge base of local activists in these House districts. This effort, together with the leadership of President Obama convinced potential champions that this was the year to move legislation through Congress. President Obama decided to make health care central to his first administration in part because he knew that the movement we were building would support him.
We helped Senator Specter start to look over his left shoulder instead of his right one. When Senator Specter expressed
doubt about some elements of health care reform, we immediately held actions at every one of his offices in the state; mobilized our activists to make hundreds of calls into his office; and launched a statewide TV campaign. Senator Specter soon became a leader for progressive health care reform.
We helped some of the Blue Dog members of Congress defend health care reform, The Blue Dogs come from barely Democratic—or in some cases overwhelmingly Republican districts. When the tea party extremists came out and started demonstrating against reform—and all of Washington feared that moderate Democratic votes for reform would be lost—we were there, working closely with Representatives Patrick Murphy (Bucks County), Kathy Dahlkemper (Erie and south), and Chris Carney (Northeast PA), to build support for reform.
In August and September of 2009 our members of Congress held 43 town hall meetings around the state. Because of our work, supporter of health care reform outnumbered the opponents, sometimes by two to one, at all but two of them. Representatives Carney, Dahlkemper and Murphy deserve a great deal of credit for talking about the benefits of health care reform to their constituents. But ourwork helped them make that case.
In other states, first and second term members of Congress with districts that Obama lost were unlikely to vote for health care reform. In Pennsylvania, two out of three did so. One staff
director of a PA Blue Dog told us, “The Congressman wanted to vote for health care reform. What you did made it possible.”
We kept up these events in the districts of champions and Blue Dogs
week after week, month after month. We did visits in congressional offices, rallies, canvasses, press conference, reports on the need for reform, and other events every week for over twenty months. Most weeks we did six simultaneous events all over the state. The second weekend in August 2009 we canvassed in thirteen locations and eight worksites, touching 8000 people in two days. And in two days in February of this year we held 52 events in every part of Pennsylvania.
And our actions helped shape the national narrative on health care reform. Time and time again, Pennsylvania HCAN held
flagship national events that helped create momentum for reform. In October 2008, we had a rally of 500 people in the Constitution Center to celebrate the champions who endorsed the HCAN Statement of Principles. In April of 2009, we joined with New Jersey HCAN at the middle of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, an event that got national attention. On June 25th, 2009, we brought 2000 Pennsylvanians to Washington for a national rally. The lead story in the Times the next day focused on the Pennsylvania event, at which Senator Specter came out in support of the public option. In August and September of 2009, our efforts to outnumber the tea party activists got national attention. In October of 2009, we led the way in mobilizing outrage against the insurance companies with a huge rally. We were one of two states in which activists committed civil disobedience to make our point. In February of this year eight Pennsylvanians marched on foot to Washington. Melanie’s March ended in a large rally with Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and five other Senators who, for the first time since the Massachusetts election debacle, committed to getting health care reform back on track. And in March, we again took busloads of Pennsylvanians to Washington to protest insurance company lobbyists.