Health Reform In The Trump Era: A Big Step Back, But Possibilities For Bigger Steps Forward | The Huffington Post

Health Reform In The Trump Era: A Big Step Back, But Possibilities For Bigger Steps Forward | The Huffington Post
"A few suggestions for work in the months ahead:
1. Colleagues are, more than ever, receptive to the single-payer message. Let’s talk about it in corridors, conferences, lecture halls and national meetings; use Facebook, Twitter, email and snail mail to recruit new PNHP members; and push journal editors to end their virtual blackout on single payer.
2. With Medicaid under attack, in many states we’ll need to join in its defense. But we must simultaneously declare that this halfway measure is no substitute for real reform. Let’s not repeat the error of ACA backers who tried to convince people that their health care problems had been solved. Similarly, defense of Medicare should not paper over that program’s flaws.
3. We need to help focus the anger at elites onto the real health care elites: insurance and drug firms, and corporate health care providers.
4. In the past PNHP has focused narrowly on single-payer reform, avoiding participation in most broad-based coalitions. We should reconsider that stance in the context of the broad opposition to the Trump regime, and the urgency of threats to our communities. Effective action will require coalitions that span many issues. We should participate in those that include a demand for single payer.
5. It’s time to ramp up organizing for H.R. 676. Politicians can no longer seek refuge in the fiction that health reform is a “done deal” and is working. While work for state-based reforms can provide a useful organizing tool, it cannot address the nation’s most acute health care problems, which are concentrated in states with little hope of local legislation."