Save the Date: Healthcare-NOW!’s 10th Anniversary Strategy Conference
This year marks our 10th anniversary! Marilyn Clement founded Healthcare-NOW! in 2004 originally under the title “Campaign for a National Health Program NOW.”
We are doing something extraordinary for our National Strategy Conference to mark this occasion: we will be hosting a mega single-payer conference jointly with the Labor Campaign for Single-Payer Health Care and the One Payer States group, all of which will converge on Oakland, California the weekend of August 22-24. After ten years, this will be our first National Strategy Conference on the west coast!
The Healthcare-NOW! and Labor Campaign conferences will be hosted at the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Hall in Oakland, and One Payer States will be hosted a short distance away at the California Nurses Association. We expect over 300 activists to attend, and participants will have the option of attending all three conferences if they choose, along with joint plenaries, keynote speakers, and a Saturday night reception that will bring everyone together.
So mark your calendar for the weekend of August 22-24! We’ll have a call for workshop proposals and a registration page up shortly. We are incredibly excited to bring such a large group of inspiring activists together to learn from one another and energize this movement!
Please be aware that the opposition to single payer is trying to use FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS to block single payer using INVESTOR-STATE PROVISIONS in FTAs which overrule national laws.
THEY won’t wait until August until after your conference, to try to bury a investor-state lock-in in the Obamacare fix or something similar.
You should look at the facts that
1.) the US committed to include health insurance in GATS
and
2.) the fact that the Obama Administration as virtually their first act in Obamacare hired Serco Group, a multinational, (an act with GATS and international trade implications) – to manage the Obamacare rollout!
WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU WANT THAN THAT?
WHAT MORE PROOF COULD THERE BE THAN THAT?
Wake up, please. If you don’t know anything about this, GET HELP FROM EXPERTS ON FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS HIDDEN GOTCHAS. THINGS LIKE INVESTOR-STATE
A hidden trap in the Obamacare Fix could make single payer impossible forever, taking it out of the realm of things any elected US leaders could change. THATS THE WHOLE IDEA OF THESE FTAs – BYPASSING DEMOCRACY- NOT FREE TRADE. Do you even realize this? Anything that could lead to global trade involvement like selling one policy over state lines. Please get on the ball.
Thank you very much for communicating that the activities related to free trade agreements could, as you wrote, “make single payer impossible”.
Worst Case: UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE, SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE, COULD BE BLOCKED FOR SOME COUNTRIES AND BE SHUT DOWN OR HINDERED DRAMATICALLY IN OTHER COUNTRIES. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY SERIOUS MATTER.