Details are here http://healthjusticeboston.org/
Participants are gathering at Dewey Square, the home of Occupy Boston, just outside of South Station beginning at 9:30 Am Saturday, 11/12/11. Physicians, nurses, and social workers are joining together to both offer services, and teach about the negative impact of profit-based medical care.
The reality is that “health insurance” has absolutely nothing to do with “health care”. Health Insurance for all does not guarantee health care for anyone. A speak out as to the impact of unemployment, underemployment (part-time, often minimum wage jobs have become the norm), foreclosure and cuts to medicare and medicaid that will hurt real people will be explained.
Already, the mental health care provider of last resort in this state is the prison system, for youths and adults. By cutting mental health care and “saving pennies” through cutting the actual care provided to vulnerable populations, huge human costs, and emergency room costs will be the result. See http://www.wbur.org/2011/07/19/women-prison-study Most of the inmates in MCI Framingham suffer from mental illness. Homeless, troubled, act strange in public – see you in Framingham sooner or later if you are a female resident of Massachusetts. The Community Mental Health System has been chronically underfunded and is once again under the knife for cuts. Funding cuts each year have left fewer and fewer openings for care. http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/03/murders_of_massachusetts_menta.html See also http://www.namimass.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Massachusetts-Mental-Health-System-is-Critically-Underfunded.pdf
Did you know the majority of bankruptcies result from the costs of health care – even for those with today’s profitable, required policies that have such huge deductibles and unrealistic caps that the only way to stay housed becomes to declare bankruptcy? Medical bills are the reason for at least 60% of bankruptcies http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH
To use the language of the Bible – you cannot serve both G*D and Mammon, Matt 6:24 http://www.thenazareneway.com/god_and_mammon.htm and we ARE our brother’s keepers, Gen 4:9
As to who is “the middle class” and whether that “class” needs defending – there is a whole lot more at stake than the middle class.
There are bigger questions that must be asked, and I think the health & justice issue is among them.
Other questions questions worth discussion, whether here or at a later date are:
1.Are we, as a country and a people, about money, or about caring for one another?
2. Are we about power and control, or preserving democracy itself?
3. Do civil liberties, the ones John Adams ensured would be in the Bill of Rights remain worth fighting for, teaching about, and protecting?
4. Are any laws really viable, or protective without access to justice?
More to follow, one issue at a time, another day. But for those who care about and believe in health care, not for-profit health insurance, tomorrow is a day of action.
