2020 Elections Crucial for the Future of Healthcare, Here's the Good News

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Though campaigning has barely begun, many of us already have election fatigue. With all we are facing in the US and on the planet, 2020 will likely be one of the most decisive election of our times. We're not suggesting that electoral politics are or will be the primary locus of change. But who's running, how, and who wins will greatly impact public consciousness and our fields of possibility for movement building and building the futures we truly want and need.

Among all the campaign issues, healthcare is one to watch. It's like a dying patient, so we need to have our finger on its pulse. More importantly, the Medical Industrial Complex is a many-tentacled beast as insidiously entangled in greed and intersectional oppression as the Prison Industrial Complex, yet less understood. It is time that our movements face, understand and transform the MIC for our futures to be possible. Of course, so many of us have been forced to face it -- through its sub-standard care, systemic racism, sexism or ableism (for far too many of us, all these at once), and its pervasive abuse and neglect.

There's a big push right now for a single-payer healthcare system or 'Medicare for All'. . . And check this out: the same republicans (now joined by democratic 'centrist including a former high-ranking staff member of the Hillary Clinton campaign, Lauren Shaver) who fell over themselves to destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are now joining forces with insurance companies, big pharma and private hospitals (and all their lobbyists pals) to rally *behind* the ACA as a tactic to completely halt public debate about Medicare for All, let alone allow it to become a reality.

But here's the good news: people power + the wave of progressive (dare we say even radical) dems in DC are pushing the healthcare debate in this country to the left. Our task now, should we choose to accept it, is to sustain a radical vision for healthcare centered in intersectional health justice: healthcare without harm, healthcare that truly puts people and the planet above profit, healthcare whose institutions and practices hold corporate polluters, big pharma, and big agro accountable for their culpability in individual illness and collective harm to planetary health. . . .healthcare and healing for our futures to be possible. So, when we win single-payer healthcare, and we will, it's just the first stepping stone on a long and crucial path to totally transforming healthcare as we know it to systems which truly serve and honor Life and uphold our collective dignity and autonomy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/politics/medicare-for-all-lobbyists.html?fbclid=IwAR3I5Qsc0cAuNzagUUDhyySoV3RREN9ohsHA5csiVSM_qRnOr73XbydNtes