Mar 27 2010
Thank You for Helping to Pass Health Care Reform
To all activists and organizers, USAction affiliates and partners, all the 30 million members of Health Care for America Now; to donors and bloggers, investigative journalists and health insurance horror story survivors; to the President and his staff, and to Members of Congress who chose to stand on the right side of history:
Thank you.
Thank you for your courageous work on health care reform that lays a foundation for a health care system we can take pride in. We are proud to have worked with you for years to win this history-making victory, what the New York Times called the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since the 1970’s.
On March 25, 1965, after the third civil rights march to Montgomery, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol:
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’… I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again…‘How long?’ Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Exactly one year later, on March 26, 1966, Dr. King said,
“Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
Our lives are dedicated to bending that arc more steeply toward justice. And on health care, we can say that, with so many others, we did just that.
In 2008, USAction co-founded Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the nation’s largest health care reform campaign with more than 1,100 coalition partners. In 2009 alone, USAction affiliates and partners, with the help of their state HCAN coalitions, generated nearly half a million grassroots contacts to Congress, organized or supported 480 town hall meetings and forums and turned out 70,997 supporters to 1,785 Congressional outreach activities, including town halls, lobby visits, grassroots call-in days, petition deliveries, press conferences and letter-writing campaigns.
We and our 27 state affiliates and partners express our deep appreciation for your leadership and support to make health care a right and build a health care system that serves the people instead of the special interests. And we know that winning this tough fight will help millions of Americans understand why progressives promote an activist and expansive role of government, the very opposite of Grover Norquist’s famous formulation to “shrink government until it’s small enough to drown in the bathtub.”
Powerful corporate interests and right-wing ideological opponents of reform will be organizing to repeal this bill and take away our access to high quality, affordable health care for all as a right. Our job is to stand our ground and demonstrate why that must not happen. We will continue to bend that arc toward justice because today is a new day and that is the mission of our movement.
Jeff Blum is Executive Director of USAction, and Co-Chair of Health Care for America Now!
WV Citizen Action is proud to have been a small part of this great national movement for Health Care Justice and work alongside our national USAction organization and the historic HCAN Campaign.
A BIG thanks is due to the vision of the folks who pulled together so many groups to form and fund HCAN and to the staff of HCAN who worked for nearly two years at full-tilt campaign mode to help pull this off. Go TEAM!