Tag: access to healthcare

Community and labor advocates rallied on Friday, April 20, 2018, at the San Francisco Potrero Hill Health Center to call for an end to the privatization of the center by Department of Public Health Director Barbara Garcia and also the retaliation against the center’s worker Cheryl Thornton, who is a member of SEIU 1021. Community members are angry that the clinic, which was founded after a long struggle, is being destroyed by city privatizers.

In other countries, people enjoy better healthcare at lower cost. Everyone has access to healthcare and average life expectancy is greater. In Canada, with their version of Medicare for All, no one goes bankrupt because of healthcare expenses. In the U.S., healthcare bankrupts more than a million every year. In a recent Kaiser poll, 81 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of all voters supported an Improved and Expanded Medicare for All. What is being done to move us in that direction?

The recent deaths of Alton Sterling, 37, and Philando Castile, 32, at the hands of state-sanctioned violence are additional tragedies in an endless list of Black victims, and a reminder that premature Black death continues to take center stage in the Black narrative. With our heads in our hands and our eyes swollen, we keep asking, when will Black lives matter? White silence about these atrocities is almost as dangerous as the hand that pulls the trigger.