Healthcare and Unemployment

BRUCE DIXON
Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, which is one of the groups organizing the "Black is Back" gathering Saturday in D.C.

He recently wrote the piece "If Democrats Don't Pass Health Insurance Reform This Year, What Do We Lose? And What Do We Gain?" The article states: "In the year since the last election the president has made concession after concession to drug and insurance companies, to private health care providers and their lobbyists. The White House, establishment Democrats and their echo chambers in the corporate media and even on the Internet have worked hard to suppress voices advocating the simple, practical and elegant solution of single-payer Medicare For All, which is still favored in polls by a substantial majority of Americans." See polling results here.

Dixon adds: "As is highlighted today with the rising unemployment numbers, the principal fact of economic life in America these days is profound insecurity. Tens of millions cannot find work, and tens of millions more who have found it live with the everyday question of what will happen if one of them gets sick or injured. ...

"Medicare For All, single payer will enable the working poor to make a stand where they are, and lift themselves out of poverty by organizing for and demanding a greater share of the wealth they produce every day. By removing the dread of financial ruin due to illness or injury, single payer will enable working people to fight for their own collective economic uplift. That's why the struggle for guaranteed and universal single payer, Medicare For All is the real deal right now, the key to unlocking a better life for millions in the near future, a concrete focus of the civil and human rights movements of our time."

Background: See "Co-Authors Question Stand Alone Vote on National Single Payer" by Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers.