by WhatAre Progressive Values [courtesy of Blog for America]

 America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.  Walter Cronkite

Patricia Player volunteers for  OneCareNow.org, the California single payer health insurance initiative.   I interviewed her at a street fair in El Cerrito, California where she was staffing the One Care Now booth. She didn't identify as being progressive because she doesn't like labels. She did talk about the value and importance of security and from her talk, I realized the relationship between security and caring. When people don't have health care and are feeling anxious and insecure, it causes them to become more concerned about themselves. When they feel secure, knowing they don't have to worry about having health care, it's easier for them to care about others. If progressives want to create a caring society, we need Single Payer Health Care.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Parker A. Duncan
MS4/MPH(c), UC Irvine
Student Board Member, California Physicians Alliance

On a blustery, but blessedly sunny, Monday in January over 350 medical and other health professional students amassed on the north steps of the capitol, creating a sea of “white coats” that enveloped keynote speaker Senator Sheila Kuehl with a deafening round of applause. The group then swarmed the Capitol, holding over 100 legislative visits with almost every Senator and most Assemblymembers, expressing their specific and exclusive support for SB 840.

The question: Why would so many students miss class (many rescheduled anatomy dissections; several rearranged exams), travel from all over California (150 of whom boarded buses in Irvine and LA at 4.30 a.m. the day before in order to also attend a 6-hour workshop, hosted at UC Davis) to meet with their legislators about a bill the Governor keeps promising he’ll veto if Senator Kuehl mounts the temerity to place it on his desk again?

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]