2024/2025 Health Care Committee Report
The LWVA Health Care Committee continued its work to fulfill the LWVUS health care position, educating and advocating for a publicly financed health care system--to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and re-introduce democratic governance in health care with coordinated resource allocation and public oversight.
However, as clarified in an impactful report from the research arm of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), "Our Payments, Their Profits," the corporate Fortune 500 medical industry is deeply entrenched, siphons off as much as a third of our health resources to investors, and effectively thwarts reform efforts. (See also, the Privatization of Everything by Cohen and Mikaelian.) The results of the 2024 November election dealt an even larger blow to the movement to de-privatize health care. The new administration lost no time adopting Heritage Foundation Project 2025 policies that prioritize handing our health care taxes over to investment firms (like United Health, Aetna, Cigna, etc.)
At that point, our local committee pivoted away from the prior year's focus to take health decision-making out of private profit-first hands. The committee also voted to tackle more local issues, so we could feel the effects of our efforts more directly. One strategy has been to ally with actions of allied groups such as the local Poor People's Campaign (PPC), the MA ACLU, who are both national League partners, Mobilize.US, and Mass-Care, a coalition of which LWVMA is a member, to achieve a state-based Single-Payer/Medicare for All system in Massachusetts. We've responded to LWV Action Alerts for protests, emphasizing health justice with our signs. With PPC, we served on the host committee for the national co-chair's book tour to Boston and Pittsfield for You Only Get What You Are Organized to Take. With Mass-Care, we participated in a "friend-raising" fund-raiser in November and a HC Beacon Hill Lobby Day in April, and we submitted testimony with them in favor of the MA M4A bills for a hearing of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing in mid-June.
At our January meeting, a new member on the committee asked why we had no programs with some of the college students with which the town is well-endowed. So, we launched a project to activate students for health care education and advocacy--in two steps. First, we set out to learn the health care concerns of students across a range of different majors, through a series of informal focus groups (involving pizza, which turned out to be crucial) in order to find messages that will resonate with people ages 18 to 26. In the process, we hope to move to step two: to recruit people in that age range to help us with social media campaigns to educate and activate their peers.
We made contacts with a couple of public health professors and the UMass Public Health Outreach Office (and their students) to get access to UMass and Amherst College ideas and resources. We began tabling in the UMass Blue Wall food court to recruit participants. Instead of remaining installed at our table, we visited tables with groups of students and asked if they would be willing to speak with us about health care. We held the first focus group in May and can't wait to regroup and do some more. Our main takeaway so far is that the students are much more open to talking about the topic than we anticipated, and come to the table with some strong (and also some mistaken) ideas. With respect to creating content for student-focused social media, we're still at square one -- our student participants reported that they use social media for social connection, but don't have experience with it as a tool for advocacy.
Looking ahead to 2025-26, we are poised to return to the campaign for de-privatizating health care, with a new set of tools. In their June 2025 state convention, LWV New York adopted LWV Vermont's updated Privatization Position with a state-to-state concurrence. Thus, New York, like Vermont, can now use League resources to fight against privatization in health care at the local and state (but not federal) level. If we can get more states to adopt concurrences or resolutions in support of Vermont's (or New York's) new privatization update, we hope to strengthen the case for LWVUS at its 2026 national convention to concur with Vermont. Then, the position will be available to all states--for advocacy at federal as well as state and local levels.
Help Wanted: an ongoing project is the tweaking and updating of our LWV SinglePayer/ Medicare for All Toolkit. We are always looking for conceptual and artistic help (inquire within), but just writing to tell us what's wrong or what's missing would be welcome. We are currently developing an idea from a neighbor for "Single Payer 101"--a brief introduction to the Toolkit. (Click on the picture to go to the first page, or find the link to the "detour" on the front page of the Toolkit-- and then send us your feedback.)
Barbara Pearson, chair
Please email Barbara for more information.