Bay Area single payer health reform activists go to state capitol

On Wednesday, April 15, activists from the San Francisco-based healthcare advocacy group Single Payer Now (SPN) traveled to the state capitol in Sacramento for the first hearing in the Senate Health Committee on SB 810, the California Universal Healthcare Act. They were joined by activists from the California School Employees Association (CSEA), the California Alliance of Retired Americans (CARA), and other senior, healthcare, union, and political organizations.

Before the 1:30 p.m. hearing, the activists, some wearing “Healthcare Yes Insurance Companies No” t-shirts, and some wearing "Single Payer Now" hats, visited the offices of legislators and delivered hundreds of signed postcards from Californians telling Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to remove the insurance industry from healthcare and support SB 810.

Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed similar legislation, previously designated SB 840, which was authored and led through the legislative process by State Senator Sheila Kuehl. Kuehl was termed-out of office in 2008.


Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco, author of the bill, informed the committee and the audience that two more legislators signed on as co-authors, bringing the total to 45, and noted that in the past 12 months, the number of Californians without health insurance has grown to 12 million.

The vast majority of the overflow crowd in the hearing room appeared to support the bill. Senator Leno noted that the “spirited and passionate crowd” all came to the hearing on their own initiative, “without a single phone call from me.” Only a small handful of opponents appeared to speak in opposition.


One of the supporters on the bus, Pat Crawford, a retired teacher from San Francisco, who spoke about her reasons for making the effort to attend this hearing, has been involved in healthcare reform activism on behalf of single payer for three years. As a teacher, she has had good healthcare benefits for herself, but could not get good coverage for her children. But she also noted that many retired teachers have no healthcare coverage at all.


Crawford told of the heartbreak she experienced when she discovered that one of her former students had given up a “wonderful career” in computers to work at Costco, because he and his young family needed healthcare. This sentiment was echoed by Maya James, a library aide, who worked several years in a job, not because she liked it, but because it offered healthcare. It was, she said, “an unnecessary choice” that people are forced to make.”

Among those testifying before the committee chaired by Sen. Elaine Alquist of San Jose, was Malinda Markowitz of the California Nurses Association, who said that as a nurse she had “seen enough denials” of health care, and that under SB 810 “we’d be free of the insurance companies and their denials.” UC Irvine medical student Parker Duncan said that he did not want to “be in a world not doing what I was trained to do,” referring to the paperwork that is one of the expensive burdens that undermine the ability of the current system to deliver health care.

By the end of the hearing, SB 810 passed the Senate Health Committee by a vote of 7 state senators in favor, 4 opposed.

Don Bechler, chair of Single Payer Now has pointed out that "California's support of single payer healthcare is in stark contrast to the White House position where discussion of the single payer option was banned at the April 6 White House Healthcare Regional Summit held in Los Angeles."

Single Payer Now is a state-wide grass-roots single payer health reform advocacy group based in San Francisco. It educates and trains activists to advocate for healthcare minus the insurance industry. In California, it supports SB 810, the California Universal Healthcare Act, and nationally, HR 676, the U.S. National Healthcare Act.


For more information, contact SPN chair Don Bechler at (415) 810-5826 or dbechler [at] value.net or log on to http://www.singlepayernow.net.