40 Days, 40 Nights to Health Care Reform
Health Care for America Now – California kicked off a 40 days, 40 nights to health care reform campaign with rallies in Los Angeles and San Francisco yesterday.
HCAN is making a final push for its enactment – asking Congress to ‘Finish reform right.’
The Los Angeles rally, in front of the California corporate offices of Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of Wellpoint (the nation’s largest health insurer), attracted perhaps 200 participants (or so I’d guess – roughly the number of participants at HCAN’s rally last September at the same site). Anthem Blue Cross – California’s largest health insurer – just announced plans to raise rates as much as 39%. Last year Blue Cross rates went up even more for some customers. The Los Angeles Times editorialized (“Reform, meet Anthem Blue Cross,” February 11, 2010) that, “the Anthem increases look suspiciously like an attempt to extract as much as possible from customers before the rules change.” So the Times’ editorial staff must agree with HCAN that health care reform is not dead.
Greg Akili, regional field organizer for the NAACP, kicked off the rally, which featured two health care consumers/patients, Steven Dornbusch and Robert Brandin, who related their unhappy experiences with big insurance companies. Doctor Casey KirkHart, of the National Physicians Alliance, also spoke to urge passage of health care reform.
Quite a few SEIU members and a handful of Teamsters were in evidence. As were a number of Organizing for America volunteers – who sent out email alerts, posted on the OFA-CA Google Group, about the rally. A number of California activists criticized OFA for abandoning the effort to pass health care reform legislation for several weeks following the election to the U.S. Senate of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Of course, the White House, the Democratic Congressional Leadership, and the DNC (the umbrella over OFA) all seemed to be caught flat-footed by Brown’s election and the resulting paralysis that resulted.
Looks like folks still haven’t given up on health care reform.
Update: Click here for the video link to a rousing rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Insurance Companies” by Billionaires for Wealthcare, who were featured at last September’s rally.
