Lessons from the Popular Education Project’s Summer School of Resistance 2019 (Keystone Fall 2019/Winter 2020 Blog Series)

by the delegation to the Political Education Project (PEP) school with support from the Political Education and Leadership Development team

For three weeks this summer, Kiki, Tammy, Hope and Jae attended the Popular Education Project’s Summer School of Resistance as the delegation from Put People First! PA. The school was held in North Carolina, and it brought together about 40 students from organizations around the country who work on different fronts of struggle for our class, like immigration, cultural work, wages, housing, health care and more..

Each day included formal classes and material to study outside of class, on history, philosophy, theory and culture related to our work of organizing our base in struggle for our human rights. An important part of the pedagogy was the organization of the school, with students divided into base groups which were responsible for the various tasks of running the school, called militant work. This included: cleaning and maintaining the space, translation, cultural work, supporting teachers, facilitating debate, etc. 

Our PPF delegation deeply experienced the struggle of the school, and came away with some key lessons:

  • “The Ruling Ideas are the Ideas of the Ruling Class” The people who profit off of our poverty control the story about why that system exists, and we have to struggle to understand the truth so that we can build a radically better, entirely different system.
  • Discipline and study are vital to our work. Our theory and practice must be built upon each other. If we want to win we are always striving to be smarter and stronger.
  • We must combat individualism. Through shared militant work, organizational structures that ensure collectivity, learning to engage in feedback and self-reflection.
  • Our struggle in the U.S. is bound up with the liberation of the working class across the world. The war economy and U.S. imperialism exploit and oppress the poor at home and abroad.  We know we have a common enemy that uses us as pawns.
  • A strength of the ruling class is divide and conquer politics. We have to develop class consciousness and learn to not see each other as the enemy. Some very hard differences came up at the school around race and levels of education.
  • Healthcare is a major weakness of the ruling class. They have no good defense for the for-profit healthcare system that is killing us. All sectors of the working class are affected by it, so we can unite around this struggle.
  • Organization is the strength of the working class. We are learning to powerfully show up for each other in collectivity. We struggle and heal together and love each other.

Put People First! PA’s Demand for a Public Healthcare Advocate (Keystone Fall 2019/Winter 2020 Blog Series)

By the Campaign Team

What is a Public Healthcare Advocate?
A public advocate (sometimes called an ombudsman) is an appointed public official who helps protect the people against abuse by private and public powers. In our proposal, a Public Healthcare Advocate would manage an office whose whole staff would protect people’s rights in the healthcare system in Pennsylvania.

What would a Public Healthcare Advocate do?
The Office of the Public Healthcare Advocate would play three main roles:

  • Provide direct assistance to people who are struggling to get healthcare, including assistance enrolling in insurance, getting coverage, challenging denied insurance claims, and negotiating bills from medical providers. This assistance would return millions of dollars in unpaid insurance claims from insurance companies to patients every year. 
  • Work with community groups (including Put People First! PA) and public agencies to educate the public on our healthcare rights, focusing especially on reaching poor and dispossessed communities who are most frequently denied their rights.
  • Work with the governor, legislators, and public agencies to report on how the health insurance system is and isn’t working for people, advocate for patients, and provide recommendations to lawmakers to improve policies and practices.

Who would a Public Healthcare Advocate serve?
The Office of the Public Healthcare Advocate would serve all residents, no exceptions. That includes people on all forms of private and public health insurance (insurance through employers, ACA plans, Medicaid/Welfare, Medicare, workers’ comp, the VA, etc.), people who are uninsured, and people who are undocumented and people who are in prison.

Are there effective Public Healthcare Advocates in other places? 
Public advocates are a highly effective, proven model for ensuring accountability and transparency in both government and corporations as long as they are given sufficient powers and funding and as long as they remain politically independent. Pennsylvania already has public advocates for long-term care, utilities, and employment and housing discrimination. Several other states have public advocates who hold both private insurance companies and public insurance programs accountable. Connecticut’s Office of the Healthcare Advocate is an especially effective model because it has a) strong powers to assist residents and report on healthcare injustices, b) guaranteed annual funding from a tax on insurance companies, and c) is insulated from political attacks by an independent advisory board and by being an appointed, not elected, position. Our proposal is largely based off of Connecticut’s model, but we’re also adapting it in some important ways, such as by designing our proposal to more explicitly serve people on Medicaid and people who are completely uninsured.

How would we organize to get a Public Healthcare Advocate in Pennsylvania?
Our goal is to get the State Legislature and the governor to pass a law creating a Public Healthcare Advocate. We anticipate that it will take us around two years to win this goal. Once a law is passed, ideally the Public Healthcare Advocate would be appointed through a transparent process in which a Community Advisory Committee would submit a list of candidates to the governor, the governor would nominate a candidate from the list, and the Legislature would vote to approve and appoint the governor’s nomination.

Creating the Office through legislation (rather than an executive order by the governor) will allow us to protect the Public Healthcare Advocate from political attacks. It will allow us to designate guaranteed annual funding for the Advocate and hold the next governor accountable to maintaining the position. This means that the ultimate decision makers in our campaign for a Public Healthcare Advocate are state legislators and the governor. We need to pressure them directly, and we also need to organize individuals and organizations who have influence over state legislators and the Governor, including staff in state agencies and our strategic partners.

How would we make sure the Public Healthcare Advocate is accountable to the people and not to private profiteers?
Whether a public advocate can be strong and independent depends on how much power we build to create strong legislation. Our legislation would need to a) provide adequate, guaranteed funding that is protected from cuts in future years and b) build in accountability mechanisms like a community advisory board, a transparent appointment process, and independence from elections to make sure that the Office isn’t captured by the insurance industry or swept up in partisan fighting. The Campaign Team will coordinate us to identify which exact accountability mechanisms we want to make sure are included in the legislation.

Ultimately, in order to ensure that the legislation and the Advocate are as strong and independent as possible, we need to be as strong and independent as possible so we can push legislators and the governor to pass a bill that meets our demands without being watered down. And if and when we win and pass legislation, we need to stay active and organized to make sure the Advocate remains strong and independent and continues to meet our needs over time.

How does campaign for a Public Healthcare Advocate connect to our other strategies and help build our power?
An Office of the Public Healthcare Advocate would directly help our class not only by assisting people to get healthcare and get their medical bills paid, but also by building more accountability, transparency, equity, and participation into Pennsylvania’s healthcare system. Organizing for a Public Healthcare Advocate is an opportunity to find our people, build our base, grow our Healthcare Rights Committees, develop our leadership, tell our stories, challenge profiteers, hold power-holders accountable, and deepen our strategic partnerships with our allies.

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This content originally appeared in Put People First! PA’s semi-annual newsletter, The Keystone. The Keystone is a great introduction to Put People First! PA, our work, and our community. It’s all written by our members for our own communication and education, and for supporters and new relationships to get to know us better. Each issue features reports from our work, news about our victories, stories about the health care system and the other issues affecting our communities, and poetry and artwork. Check out past and present editions here: Newsletter Archive.

Dispatches from the UK (Keystone Fall 2019/Winter 2020 Blog Series)

My name is Philip. I have had the privilege of visiting the US several times over the last few years. Two times on a J1 visa to work over the summer and another for a shorter but still sweet visit. I struggle to stay away: the wide open spaces, impressive vistas but mostly importantly, the inherent warmth of the people I’ve met in my time there. I have been welcomed, befriended and loved. That spirit stays with me, even after the plane ride home.

I have also been very lucky, I was born in the UK. I was born prematurely, c-sectioned. The intensive care unit being the first surroundings I became familiar with. I got better, thanks to the diligent work of the hospital staff lookingn after me and despite a traumatic start, my mother and father got to take me home. They could start their life with me, unburdened by worries of payments and costs.

Both my father and I have been rushed to hospital at least once in our lifetimes since then and have left healed and healthier with no bill attached to our treatment. My mother has recently had procedures to help with her vision as she grows older. All without fear of how we’d find the funds to pay. I have lived a life, grown up to become an adult knowing nothing else but universal healthcare in the National Health System (NHS).

I am lucky. I have loved ones in the U.S. whose debts get bigger and bigger with each treatment, people who I’ve met who are almost afraid to get sick because of the cost incurred, friends who have suffered because their medication has been switched to something cheaper. I don’t know why it has to be this way.

Well actually, I do because we live in a world, in a system where profit is the goal above everything else – even our own lives. I’m sure you’ve heard the horror stories about the NHS: the waiting times, the care coverage. The NHS is in crisis, they say.

Every winter, on the loop, for over a decade. This is because providing a basic level of healthcare for all isn’t profitable for the powers that be. For years now, our health service has been undermined, sold off and smeared. The health service that meant I am here today, alive.

Under a private system, my birth and it’s complications could’ve cost my parents up to 23,000 pounds. That’s 30,000 dollars. Money they just wouldn’t have had. The NHS isn’t perfect, I’m not here to tell you it is. A universal healthcare system is always going to be a struggle in the society we live in but the benefit to an average person, the lives saved and prolonged with it in place far outweigh the frustrations of sitting in a waiting-room chair a while. Something that still happens under the current US system despite privatization.

Most people in the US pay into work-based health insurance, taking about 20% of their earnings. In the UK, we pay 13% into a host of benefits and assistance services including disability allowance and unemployment. The NHS is just a small fraction of that. Let’s be generous and say it’s 5% of the money I currently earn, that’s just under 11 pound a month… 14 dollars. A quick run to Wal-Mart. You could have this too, you just need to make yourself heard, be so loud they can’t ignore you.

Put People First! PA believes that healthcare is a human right, just like me. They fight for universal healthcare, to support the poor and dispossessed who cannot afford increasingly expensive private insurances. I have U.S. American people that I love and I don’t want to see them suffer anymore. Their lives and their health are priceless to me.

I don’t want to come across as preaching, I just want you to consider there is an alternative. You don’t need to spend ridiculous money on medicines, you don’t need to worry about whether or not to call an ambulance. There is an alternative, we just have to fight for it.

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This content originally appeared in Put People First! PA’s semi-annual newsletter, The Keystone. The Keystone is a great introduction to Put People First! PA, our work, and our community. It’s all written by our members for our own communication and education, and for supporters and new relationships to get to know us better. Each issue features reports from our work, news about our victories, stories about the health care system and the other issues affecting our communities, and poetry and artwork. Check out past and present editions here: Newsletter Archive.

Member Reflection: Nathaniel Warren (Keystone Fall 2019/Winter 2020 Blog Series)

The first time I heard of Put People First! PA was when the Lancaster HRC began organizing around the closing of St. Joseph’s Hospital. At the time I couldn’t participate much, but I started to talk with members and helped put up posters about the action. About half a year later I was finally able to go to a PPF-PA action, and that’s when I started to get more involved. I began attending meetings and went to the Leadership Institute in York. The community is what has kept me. 

Lately I’ve continued to take on more roles within PPF-PA – I’ve joined the community care team, and I helped keep our group together during our recent Medicaid March on Penn Medicine Lancaster General Hospital. Life still gets in the way more than I would like it too, but when we talk about a movement of the working class, it’s more than a platitude. I know I have a place here and will continue to be more and more involved in the movement.

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This content originally appeared in Put People First! PA’s semi-annual newsletter, The Keystone. The Keystone is a great introduction to Put People First! PA, our work, and our community. It’s all written by our members for our own communication and education, and for supporters and new relationships to get to know us better. Each issue features reports from our work, news about our victories, stories about the health care system and the other issues affecting our communities, and poetry and artwork. Check out past and present editions here: Newsletter Archive.

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