I sent this as an email to 15,000 of my closest friends, the health care activists in Pennsylvania, this morning.
Dear Friends,
We have another day or two until the Senate takes up health care reform. Before that happens I want to give you an update about where our campaign is going and what you can do to move it forward.
Where we are
At this point in our campaign, the most important thing I want to say is that we progressives have to learn how to win. It’s been a long time since we have enacted major legislation that dramatically improve the lives of working people and the middle class. And while, we have built a huge movement and made a lot of progress this year, I’m still not sure we know how win.
In saying that we have to learn how to win, I mean to say a few things:
1. We have to learn how to stay active and engaged.
Please do not think that, with the House vote, we have won. We haven’t. Senate consideration of the bill, which will start at the end of this week, could take us through December. There will be many amendments to the bill Majority Leader Reid proposes and we will be asking you to call our Senators again and again to encourage them to vote the right way.
And then, after the Senate vote, there will be a conference committee that develops a final bill and then a vote for passage of the conference committee bill in the House and the Senate. Those votes are likely to be very close as there are many contentious issues to be resolved.
Moreover, the insurance companies have just begun to ramp up their dishonest campaign against reform And we can’t match what they can spend on TV.
To win at each step of the way, we need you your hard work to counter the ad blitz of the insurance companies. We need you to keep coming to the events, to keep contacting Senators Casey and Specter and our Representatives, and to keep taking part in our phone banking efforts.
2. We have to learn how to deal with the frustration of temporary setbacks.
Many of us were very disappointed with the Stupak amendment to the House bill. Some people are so upset that washed their hands of health care reform.
There may be other disappointments. The Senate bill may not be strong in some respects as we would like.
I’m asking all of you to be patient. Sometimes in the legislative process, leaders change a bill in order to get to the next stage in the legislative process, fully expecting to change it back to what they (and we) really want.
While some of our coalition partners support the Stupak amendment, as I explain in this blog post, HCAN is committed to the reproductive rights of women and we are working to enact health care reform legislation without the Stupak amendment. We have a strategy to make that happen.
And we also have a strategy to fix some problems that might arise in the Senate bill when we get to the Conference Committee.
So we need you to keep the faith as we work to make through the legislative process until the final bill a good one.
3. We have to know when we have won
After the House vote I heard from some people who agreed with the negative assessment of this legislation put forward by Representative Kucinich and other supporters of single payer.
Some of the organizations that make up HCAN would prefer single payer. (As someone who has taught and studied health care for years, and speaking just for myself, I’ve never thought that single payer was either a necessary or sufficient means of reforming health care.)
But we all agree that this legislation is a huge step forward. As I explain in a recent blog post, even on the worst construal of the legislation that just passed the House, in each year it will save the lives of thousands of people; it will reduce the suffering of tens of thousands; it will keep a half million people out of bankruptcy; it will make health insurance available to tens of millions of people who cannot afford it now; it will reduce insurance premiums by thousands of dollars for almost all individuals and small businesses; and it will substantially reduce the obscene profits of insurance companies.
How often have we progressives accomplished something like that? And how often do we enact legislation that will go so far to reestablish the legitimacy of government action in America?
If there were a strategy that could have moved single payer through Congress, we might have a reason to be disappointed. But there was no such strategy.
So I implore all of you to recognize just how much we can win this year and not to be distracted from our work by the critics of this legislation. Keep in mind that is not an exercise in theory; we are fighting to save and improve the lives of real people. And we intend to do that.
We may not reach Messianic times with this legislation. But it will certainly take us out of Egypt and, after a few (not forty) years of implementation, it will enable us to get to the promised land of quality, affordable health care for all.
Thanks for all that you have done, are doing, and will do to make this happen.
Marc
PS If you have not read about the 17 events we did last week at which 600 of you came out to thank supporters of health care reform and complain about those who voted against it, check out this blog post. Thanking members for their votes is critical to our efforts. So thanks to all of you who came out to join us.
Marc Stier
PA State Director
Health Care for America Now
MarcStier@hcanpa.org
(215) 880-6142