At Healthcare NOW, we’re used to getting push-back from folks who don’t believe in Medicare for All, and we always expect to hear from those folks – but this episode is about something different. When we announced our annual national  Medicare for All Strategy Conference is happening this November, we got some push-back – not about our fight for healthcare justice, but about our choice of venue. Some of our supporters were upset that we’re going to be gathering in a Red State – ok, arguably the king of the Red States: Florida. We’ve gotten emails from folks who won’t attend on principle because they refuse to go to (and this is a quote) the “Evil DeSantis State.” So today we’re joined by one of the leaders of Medicare for All Florida to dig into what’s happening in Florida, why we’re heading to the Sunshine State for our conference, and – most importantly – how you can join us this November 22&23rd to bring the fight to Red America.

Consider this your official invite to our National Medicare for All Strategy Conference:

Find out more and register here!

Want to learn more about how Medicare for All activists are fighting to move forward toward healthcare justice amid constant assaults on public healthcare from their state government? Check out the Medicare for All Florida website!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at here!

Anyone who’s been on the internet and wants to preserve their sanity knows one, eternal truth: Don’t read the comments section. The comments, as we all know, are where our better angels go to die – where we forget our humanity and type out the ugliest, scariest stuff we were apparently thinking all along? Well, today, against our better judgement, we are going to disregard best practice and dig in to what people are saying in the comments about healthcare. Because how are we ever going to win over the people if we don’t know what the people have to say? We tasked our researcher, Ashley Schultz — the most chronically online of our followers, with digging through the dregs of the internet, and she’s here to talk about what she found.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

:::CONTENT WARNING::: This episode contains graphic discussions of genocide.

Here at the Medicare for All Podcast, we are usually focused on the US, but the fight for universal access to healthcare is one that stretches way beyond our borders. Today we take a global perspective and check in with a group of doctors who are putting their lives on the line to address the serious devastation happening right now in Gaza and its impact on the health of Palestinians living through that devastation. We’re joined by the founders of Doctors Against Genocide to talk about how a political conflict turns into a public health crisis, and what kind of action we can take to stop it.

Our guests are Dr. Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle, a pediatric neurologist in Boston, Massachusetts, and Dr. Nidal Jboor, an internist in Dearborn, Michigan, who together co-founded of Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), “a global coalition of healthcare workers dedicated to succeeding where global governments have failed in confronting Genocide.”

Want to support the incredible work of Doctors Against Genocide? Whether or not you’re a doctor, you can join DAG and/or donate here!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

 We’re talking about Medicaid folks, the public healthcare system meant to be our social safety net for anyone who can’t afford private insurance and doesn’t have access to healthcare from an employer. I’m sure most of you are aware of Medicaid — but what you might not know is just how many of our friends and neighbors land in that safety net every year. Over 70 Million people in this country rely on the Medicaid program for basic healthcare. That’s 20% of Americans, or one out of every five people you meet. That means that even if you are not on Medicaid, the $880 Billion in cuts to the program proposed by congress will affect you or someone you love, and not in a good way. In fact, just today, researchers at Yale and UPenn released new research stating that the Trump cuts would cause over 51,000 additional Americans to die each year. For this episode, I’m joined by Jaron Benjamin, Deputy Chief of Campaigns from Popular Democracy to break down why we all need to care about stopping the cuts and act NOW, before it’s too late!

We need YOU to join the fight to save Medicaid! Find out more about what you can do here!

You can learn more about the great work happening at Popular Democracy here!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

Whether you are a party planner or a community organizer, you know that since the pandemic, it has been REALLY hard to get folks out of the house. It makes sense: the news is depressing, our screen-based scrolling culture is alienating, and our politics are polarizing to the point where a casual conversation can easily escalate to throwing hands. That being said, this month has been different! In response to Trump 2.0, we’re seeing an uprising of activism in the streets, with millions of Americans participating in Hands Off protests and other actions to fight back against Trump’s attacks on everything from migrant rights to Medicaid. What’s behind this second wave of Trump resistance? As per usual, it’s a lot of ordinary people deciding they can’t wait any longer for change. On today’s episode, I’m talking to the leaders taking action in my local Texas community to get some perspective on Resistance 2.0 and why it’s all kicking off right now!

In this episode, Gillian talks with her favorite new activists from Indivisible Coastal Bend, the local Indivisible chapter in Corpus Christi, Texas. Ashley, Misty, and Stacie have always been concerned with politics, but the latest developments of the 2nd Trump Administration prompted them to take their concern to the streets and start organizing! Now these women are local leaders in the national uprising happening right now across the US, fighting against cuts to Medicaid and social security, the elimination of DEI, and the overall assault on Democracy. You can read more about the incredible work they’ve been doing here and here!

This is an important moment for all of us in the healthcare justice movement to get together with our allies in the streets to stand up for our public healthcare and demand that we move forward toward universal healthcare, not backward, leaving even more folks out in the cold. So make sure to sign up for our Healthcare Now HEAT (Health Emergency Action Team) to get alerts about rapid response actions you can take to defend Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, reproductive healthcare, gender-affirming care, vaccines, the rights of healthcare workers, and more! Join the team here!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

For this episode, we’re going back to a familiar villain from podcast-past because  unfortunately, healthcare villains have a habit of staying relevant. This is a guy who made his fame by cozying up to Oprah while schilling diet pills, supplements, and medical conspiracy theories – it’s Doctor Oz, who is now Trump’s nominee for Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That’s right, the man who has previously claimed that there are deadly levels of arsenic in apple juice, that most olive oil is fake, that “Reparative Therapy” can cure homosexuality, and that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, is pretty close to running our largest public health systems. Today I’m talking with Dr. Diljeet Singh of Physicians for a National Health program about what that means for you and the country at large, and how we can do something about it! 

NOTE: At the Medicare for All Podcast, we’ve had a brief, unplanned hiatus due to pesky technical issues – and the fact that Trump is keeping us busy in our organizing work – but we are very excited to be back! I’m flying solo right now while my regular cohost Ben is saving the environment at his 9 to 5 organizing job, but that feels like important work as well, so we’re going to give him a pass and send him our love!

Our guest for this episode was the brilliant Dr. Diljeet Singh! She’s a women’s health advocate, an integrative gynecologic oncologist, and the President of Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Singh received her medical degree from Northwestern University and her master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed an obstetrics and gynecology residency at Johns Hopkins and a gynecologic oncology fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. She completed her doctoral degree in public health on cost analysis at the University of Texas School of Public Health and an associate fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Singh and our friends at Physicians for a National Health Program are going all out to let folks know about the serious danger Dr. Oz poses to our national health! Check out the videos from their Dr. Oz Shadow Hearing below:

Even though it is likely that the Senate will make it official later this month, as of April 1st, Dr. Oz still hasn’t been confirmed, so if you’re listening to this in the next couple weeks, you may still be able to call your Senators to ask them to come to their senses! Reach their offices through the Capitol Hill switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

Listeners, what were you doing in 2004? Perhaps you were strolling down the street in low rise jeans, Uggs, and a Livestrong bracelet listening to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” Or maybe you were sitting in a movie theater ready to have your mind blown by Ashton Kutcher’s tour de force performance in The Butterfly Effect. Well, the folks joining us on this week’s episode of our podcast may have missed some of that stuff because they were too busy building a movement for healthcare justice! 2024 marks the 20th anniversary of Healthcare NOW, the national organization fighting for Medicare for All that brings you your favorite podcast! If you’re a regular listener, you probably know that I was the Executive Director of Healthcare NOW for 11 years, and Gillian is the current Executive Director, but today we’re taking it back to 2004 and talking with some of the OGs who started it all!

This episode features some of our very favorite people — the leaders in the healthcare justice movement who have made Healthcare NOW what it is today (the creator of your favorite podcast content!):

If this episode doesn’t give you your fill of Healthcare NOW history, you can always check out Lindy’s book or this sweet tribute to our founder Marilyn Clement.

And of course, if you want to keep up the good work of all these amazing folks, you can make a donation to support our work!

Well, the voters have spoken, and despite all of our recommendations to the contrary, they seem to have voted for Trump. Yeah, we’re pretty sad/scared/pissed off/trying to cope by dissociating and stress eating as well. Regardless, once again, it’s Trump’s America and we’re just living (or dying) in it. We know from experience that a Trump presidency is bad for our health, but now he has a surprising new ally in making our lives shorter and more dangerous: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

RFK is a former presidential candidate and critic of Trump, an expert falconer, an eater of roadkill, a source of shame for the entire Kennedy family, and a “superspreader” of false information about vaccines. And now he’s about to bring his mission to Make America Healthy Again to the masses as the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the entire USA. In this episode, we’re going to try to figure out what the hell that means.

RFK Jr has some wild ideas about medicine and public health, making some strange connections between cause and effect in our health. Let’s play a game! We’ll give you some health outcomes, and you guess what RFK has said is the cause of the problem (or “problem” in several cases). (Sources: BBC, HuffPo, Daily Beast) 

Problem: Autism, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and ADHD
Cause: Vaccines!  

This assertion is primarily based on the fact that SOME earlier vaccines included a preservative thimerosal, a compound that contains mercury, even though it’s been debunked AND hasn’t been included in children’s vaccines since 2001.

Problem: Arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease
Cause: Fluoride in drinking water!

Problem: Fatness, depression, and cancer
Cause: Ultra Processed Foods 
Solution: Raw milk!

Problem: AIDS
Cause: Not HIV! (See his book about Anthony Faucci)

Problem: Increasing concentrations of bioavailable aluminum in the environment
Cause: Chemtrails

This one’s a trick question because in a 2016, a survey of scientists showed that most of them didn’t even believe that aluminum levels were increasing, let alone that chemtrails exist.

Problem: Gay and Trans Kids
Cause: Pesticides (atrazine) in tap water. Amazing logic here: “[atrazine can] chemically castrate and forcibly feminize [frogs]… If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.”  

Problem: COVID 19
Cause: Chinese bioweapon. His logic (from a campaign video leaked to the NY Post): “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and the impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.” A heaping helping of anti-Asian racism with a side of antisemitism!

Problem: RFK Jr’s own problems with memory loss and cognition
Cause: He said in a 2012 divorce deposition, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Also, tuna fish. He hasn’t ever provided medical records to document this, but doctors say it might have happened?

Despite the fact that he’s about to be nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. isn’t a doctor or a medical researcher. The brain worm explains a lot about RFK Jr’s thinking, but neural parasites aside, how did this guy get to be a “public health expert” to begin with?

He started as a well-respected environmental lawyer. In 1984, he began volunteering with The Hudson River Fisherman’s Association, later renamed “Riverkeeper,” which inspired the global “Waterkeeper” movement. He sued big polluters, helped formulate a model for sustainable development, and defended communities of color disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination.

In the 2020s, even after he had begun his second career as an aspiring politician and reliable source of health misinformation, at least some part of his brain was working right: He supported the Green New Deal, criticized Trump for his “hostility towards the environment” and he criticized geoengineering and carbon capture as “disastrous from an environmental point of view, and it also is just a subsidy for big carbon.”

While working on a case against a polluter contaminating drinking water with mercury in the early 2000s, he met a persistent group of mothers who claimed that the real problem was mercury in vaccines. He was eventually persuaded. He told Joe Rogan in 2023 “I thought, even if they’re wrong, someone should listen to them.”

RFK then hooked up with the anti-vaxxers who eventually founded the “World Mercury Project” in 2007. By 2015, he became the chair of the board for the organization, which rebranded as “Children’s Health Defense.” (Not the Children’s Defense Fund, a legit child welfare non-profit that has already put out a statement clearing up any confusion between them and Children’s Health Defense.)

In 2019, RFK Jr brought his anti-vaxx message to Samoa, where he met with government officials and spoke out publicly against the Measles vaccine. By 2020, at least 83 people had died in a massive measles outbreak caused by lowered rates of vaccination. RFK blamed the vaccine itself for the outbreak.

By 2021, a study identified RFK Jr’s personal Twitter account was as the top “superspreader” of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, responsible for 13% of all reshares of misinformation, more than three times the second most-retweeted account.

RFK Jr started out with a great deal of insight about the actual, well-documented conspiracies between big corporations and the US government to disempower people and destroy their communities. Then he fell down the rabbit hole of invented conspiracy. It’s a real problem for folks on the left. We know that corporations are evil, that the government colludes with corporate oligarchs, that the government and corporations both have a history of lying to the public about health and medicine. So it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing everything negative you hear.

What kind of actual damage can RFK Jr. do as the Secretary of Health and Human Services? Unfortunately, he will have jurisdiction over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Indian Health Service (IHS), and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). So get ready for snake oil, grifting, and block grants. 

Now, there’s no guarantee he will be confirmed to this role, but that will depend on a handful of GOP Senators growing a spine. We have to keep our attention on Congress, who can do even more damage: cutting Medicaid, cutting access to food stamps, and revoking all the reforms of the ACA. While the damage RFK can do at HHS is reversible when (if?) we elect a Democrat to the White House, but the damage Congress will inflict is much harder to undo.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform! This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund!

This show is a project of the Healthcare-NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org. It’s end-of-year giving season, so please make your way to our website and chip in!

We spend a lot of time griping about the insidious power of corporate health insurance in our healthcare system here. But you would expect that taxpayer funded public programs for our most vulnerable friends and neighbors are free from profiteering right? 

Sadly, no. Medicaid – the public program that serves the lowest income Americans, plus some people with disabilities, and a lot of the country’s long-term care – has been extensively privatized in most states. Hoping to trim budgets, most states have outsourced Medicaid recipients to “Medicaid Managed Care Organizations,” which are actually private insurance companies. And with private insurance comes the barriers to care we know all too well, like prior authorizations, denial of claims, and narrow networks. These are all part of the private insurance/public programs business model: the more care they avoid paying for, the more money from those capitated payments they get to keep.

But today we have a rare ray of sunshine: a state showing there’s another way to provide care, not just coverage, to some of their most vulnerable residents. In 2012 Connecticut kicked the private insurance-run Managed Care Organizations out of their Medicaid program. They took on Big Insurance and won. Our guest today will walk us through how it went down.

Sheldon Toubman has been a litigation attorney for Disability Rights Connecticut since 2021, and a leader of the efforts to remove Managed Care Organizations from the state’s Medicaid program. Before that, he was a staff attorney with New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), where he spent 30 years representing and working on behalf of Medicaid enrollees. He engages in a variety of strategies on behalf of people with disabilities, from litigation to legislative advocacy and public education through media, webinars and other means.

Sheldon tells us that before 2012, Connecticut’s Medicaid program was bifurcarted: eligible kids, pregnant people, and families were in a capitated Managed Care Organization (MCO) model and people with disabilities were in a fee-for-service program. (Medicaid is funded with federal dollars, but unlike Medicare, states design the programs and make all the decisions about plans.) With a fee-for-service model, the state takes on the risk. With the MCO model, the MCO receives a per-person/per-month fee (a “capitated payment”) from the state, and they have to provide the care; if the patient requires less care, the MCO keeps the money, but if the patient requires more care, the MCO has to pay for the amount above the per-person/per-month fee. MCOs had a financial incentive to deny care so they could recoup more money.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Medicaid advocates began a campaign of lawsuits and lobbying to remove Managed Care from their Medicaid program.

Hartford, Connecticut is known as the insurace capital of the US, so this was a tough fight. Insurance companies fought this campaign because public programs are a major profit center for insurers, often more profitable than private employer-sponsored insurance. The insurance industry claimed they provided excellent care for less money, and coordinated care in a way that’s not possible with the fee-for-service model. The insurance industry also ran ads about all the jobs they provide, and legislators were afraid to tangle with them. When the state asked for data about how the MCOs spent public dollars, they refused to provide it. So advocates only had anecdotal information, and it was hard to refute the claims the MCOs made about how well they served patients.

One of the anecdotal complaints they heard the most was the lack of access to providers. Advocates convinced the state to check the insurance company provider network lists, so the state instituted a Secret Shopper survey to analyze them. They found that patients could get an appointment with supposed in-network providers only 25% of the time, across all the MCOs Connecticut contracted with.

Around the same time, one of the lawsuits resulted in a decision that the MCOs were subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) forcing them to give their data to the state. The state and advocates learned not only that the MCOs put up barriers to deny care, but also that providers weren’t getting paid (despite the MCOs’ claims they paid better than Medicaid rates). Providers were fed up with the MCOs and thus had no incentive to take Medicaid patients.

During the 2010 gubernatorial race, Medicaid advocates shared all this information with the candidates. They were lucky that the winner, Dannell Malloy, didn’t have any allegiance to the insurance industry. Once he was in office, Gov. Malloy responded to the 12 year campaign by Medicaid advocates by directing the state to take the risk back by going back to fee-for-service. They put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for companies to provide administrative services for medical, dental, behavioral health, and medical transportation on a non-risk basis. Thus, those entities wouldn’t have a financial stake in denying claims and narrowing networks. The Governor also instituted a Primary Care Case Management model to actually manage care.

After 2012 Connecticut saw a huge improvement in access to providers. Removing MCOs from the program was a huge incentive for them to sign up to care for Medicaid patients. The state has saved billions of dollars. The medical loss ratio is about 97%: that means 97% of the tax dollars are going to provide care to patients, with only 3% going to overhead, marketing, lobbying, and huge salaries and bonuses for insurance company executives. The Primary Care Case Management model is really coordinating care for about 50% of patients. Today’s Connecticut Medicaid program isn’t perfect; provider rates for specialists and behavioral health providers aren’t ideal. But thanks to the work done in 2012, they know what those rates are and can address them head on.

Sheldon notes that insurance companies that sell Medicare Advantage plans operate on the same MCO model with similar results: barriers to and denial of care, and profiteering. Connecticut’s model could be applied in other states and nationwide for a Medicare for All type system.

Sheldon’s advice to other states: conduct Secret Shopper surveys! Publicize that the state isn’t holding contractors accountable for how tax dollars are being spent. Toxify the industry so politicians won’t want to be on their side.

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on  Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform!

This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.

In case you’ve been asleep or under a rock for the past six months, we need to let you know two things: First, Kendrick won his beef with Drake, and second, there is a presidential election coming up. Like any presidential election year, everyone’s so focused on the big showdown at the top of the ticket, but that means that a lot of the local and state races, congressional races, and referenda that will make up most of your ballot are getting ignored. Just because Anderson Cooper isn’t covering your city’s mayoral contest or your state’s Railroad Commissioner race doesn’t mean those elections aren’t critically important in determining the immediate future of your community and getting important issues like healthcare on the table! So for this episode, we’re going to leave the speculation about Donald and Kamala to Anderson and take our own 360 view of why we all need to get in on the down-ballot action and how we bring healthcare justice to the forefront of our election conversations. 

We have two guests who know their way around a Get Out the Vote Drive!

Jasmine Ruddy is the Assistant Director of Campaigns for National Nurses United. She helps lead NNU’s political campaigns from Medicare for All to electoral work and more! Her background is in the climate justice movement and campus/student organizing in her home state of North Carolina 

Jonathan Cohn is the Policy Director at Progressive Massachusetts, which does multi-issue advocacy work. Jonathan wears many hats in the political space in Massachusetts and has been active in many progressive issue and electoral campaigns over the past little over a decade.

Jasmine describes the local campaign that got her hooked: as a campus organizer for climate justice she helped win ballot measures to pass a regional transit tax. It was a concrete and tangible way to make an impact on the climate justice movement.

Jonathan cut his political teeth on the Obama 2012 campaign, and got the local politics bug when Boston Mayor Tom Menino retired. Twelve candidates came forward for the first open mayoral race in 20 years. He was especially interested in public school policies and funding. He volunteered for mayoral candidate and City Council Member Felix Arroyo Jr.

Ben confesses that while he loves democracy, he hates elections (#relatable). But he does find more hopefulness at the local level. He also got started in a mayoral election in Boston, but the most exciting campaign he worked on was for state house. He lived in one of the most progressive districts in the state but their state representative was a powerful, well-funded right-leaning Democrat. Ben’s candidate, Nika Elugardo, a true progressive beat him despite all those advantages.

Picture it:

New Jersey, 1990s, tween Gillian lives in a suburb (North Plainfield) seeking to change its name to distance itself from the majority Black and Brown city of Plainfield. During a town-wide debate on the ballot measure, young Gillian spoke against renaming the city. She was quoted on the front page of the local paper: “North Plainfield shouldn’t change its name. Stonybrook is just a dirty brook that divides our town, just like this issue is doing right now.” The anti-name change side won and our star was born.

We discuss the additional influence a voter can have when working on a local election. When races can be won or lost by a few dozen votes, the candidates care a lot more about each individual. They may knock on your door or call you seeking support, which is a great opportunity to insert the issues you care about into the election. Once your candidate gets elected, they’ll remember the folks who helped them get there and you’ll have more influence when lobbying them on the issues you care about. (You may even end up with a job.)

Jonathan’s personal philosophy is “Boo and Vote.” He never liked Obama’s catchphrase “don’t boo; vote” because it implied the two are mutally exclusive; he believes activists have every right to boo, criticize, and protest failures, bad actions, and inactions of elected officials (both our enemies and friends). Yet he will also vote and get others out to vote. The work of democracy and making change has to include both booing and voting.

Booing our friends sounds counterintuitive, but is still important. Just because we supported a candidate’s election, we have to hold them accountable to do the right thing after they’re elected. Maybe we don’t criticize them as harshly as an opponent, but we have to demand they live up to the values of the people who put them in office. Elected officials are often most responsive to these demands during an election.

Organizing tactics and accountability look different during an election. Jasmine tells us about the Patients Over Profits Pledge, calling on candidates to reject campaign contributions from the corporate healthcare industry (inspired by the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge from the climate justice movement.) During peak times when candidates are seeking donations and support is the perfect time to make these demands.

Even with a federal issue campaign like Medicare for All, the Patients Over Profits Pledge has a role in local elections. It gives activists a great opportunity to remind candidates that healthcare is an important issue in their local area. Corporate healthcare already has too much influence over our democracy and elected officials, and this is our opportunity to toxify that relationship, making it unsavory for candidates to take their dirty money.

Local elections are also important as a pipeline: your city councillor today could be your Congressperson next cycle, with a lot of sway on healthcare policy. (Post-pod fact check: VP Candidate Tim Walz wasn’t a state legislator, but in his first race for Congress he was indeed funded by many individuals employed by Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and by PACs representing the healthcare industry.) It’s really important that we not allow candidates’ views on healthcare to be shaped only by those in corporate healthcare. Supporting pro-M4A candidates or starting to talk about healthcare justice with candidates when they’re running for local office means that if they run for higher office you’ll already be an influence on how they perceive the healthcare industry.

Jasmine describes how activists use the Patients Over Profits Pledge to have conversations and build relationships with candidates up and down the ballot. Any voter can ask candidates in their community by asking them to sign the pledge. As more and more candidates sign on, our movement to toxify corporate healthcare grows stronger. Reach out to Jasmine’s team to get active yourself!

Don’t forget to like this episode and subscribe to The Medicare for All Podcast on your favorite podcast platform! You can listen to Medicare for All on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or visit our website here.

This show is a project of the Healthcare NOW Education Fund! If you want to support our work, you can donate at our website, healthcare-now.org.