News Release

Healthcare Protests and Prospects

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CHARLES IDELSON, DONNA SMITH
Idelson is a spokesperson for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. Politico reported late Tuesday: “Single-payer activists and labor union members held a sit-in at House Speaker Pelosi’s San Fransisco office today where 11 [in fact 12] people were arrested, said Chuck Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. The group was protesting Pelosi’s decision to strip the healthcare reform bill of a provision that would let states set up single-payer systems…”

Smith is a community organizer with the group. She was one of the people featured in Michael Moore’s movie SiCKO. She says in a just-released video of the people profiled in SiCKO: “We had some pretty terrible things happen to us at the hands of the healthcare system. … We wanted to know if the legislation and what President Obama is proposing would prevent those things from happening to us again. And we’re sad to say, to a person, the answer is all the things that happened to us would still be able to happen again.” See video.

DANIEL HODGES
One of the 12 arrested at Pelosi’s office yesterday, Hodges is chair of Healthcare for All – California. “The Kucinich Amendment — which would have helped states implement a single-payer / Medicare for All system — has apparently been kept out of the legislation by Pelosi. We in California have twice passed a single payer-bill in the state legislature without the help of the Kucinich Amendment, and we will do it again and again until we elect a governor who will sign the bill.”

See: “Healthcare: Key Democrats Undermining Their Own?

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167