2AC – LT – Single Payer k2 Social Movements

Rudiger 16 – Anja Rudiger, Ph.D. in Political Theory from the University of Kiel, former Director of Programs at the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative (“Human Rights and the Political Economy of Universal Health Care,” Health and Human Rights, Vol. 18, No. 2, pgs. 67-78, https://www.hhrjournal.org/2016/12/human-rights-and-the-political-economy-of-universal-health-care-designing-equitable-financing/)

The design of a financing mechanism determines equity in access to and payment for health care. To inform the preparation of a financing plan, the HCHR campaign looked to the human rights standards in its system assessment tool and to the equity principle in Act 48. The goal was to produce actionable guidance for realizing the principle of equity in financing in a way that generated sufficient revenue for meeting all residents’ health needs. This focus on equity coincided with the Occupy movement’s protests against rising inequality, which catalyzed an ongoing debate in US politics about the largest concentration of wealth since the 1930s and the greatest income inequality since the late 1970s.19 Regressive health care financing is a significant contributor to economic inequality, producing an inverse correlation between household income and household health care spending.20 Conversely, a redistributive universal health care system in the United States would deliver significant financial relief to lower- and middle-income families.21 Providing health care as a public good could also pave the way for a broader paradigm shift toward universal public programs, replacing the threadbare safety net of means-tested benefits. Health care could function as a strategic lever for building a more equitable society through the universal provision of the goods and services needed to exercise economic and social rights. In turn, increased equity would further improve health outcomes.22 It follows that health reform goals should reflect the direct correlation between health and equity by measuring not only health but also equity indicators. This broader equity vision characterizes the HCHR campaign’s approach to financing, which aims to disrupt the vicious circle of inequity and poor health fueled by unequal access to care based on income, wealth, and employment. International health systems research confirms that commercialized health systems with significant private sector involvement both impede access to care and deepen inequities.23 The market-based insurance system in the United States demonstrates that private pre-payment schemes are neither intended nor equipped to guarantee equity in access to and payment for care. Any redistributive potential of pre-payment is lost when the insurance business model incentivizes access restrictions by means of cost-sharing, narrow provider networks, and prior authorization processes, and when even a slightly more progressive premium structure for low-income policyholders, as mandated by the ACA, requires the channeling of sizable public subsidies to private insurance companies.

It’s particularly true for health care – grassroots and community-oriented solutions are insufficient to solve widespread material suffering – need to organize demands for universal health care

Glen Ford 07, Executive Editor and Co-Founder of the Black Agenda Report and former host of America’s Black Fourm, 10/31/2007, Self-Help: A Stolen Word Wielded as a Weapon Against Black Activism, http://www.nathanielturner.com/selfhelpstolenwordwieldedasweapon.htm

¶ The Black/white right-wing's attempted usurpation of the civilized qualities "self-reliance," "self-discipline" and "personal responsibility" amounts to slander against Black ancestry. To be successful, all mass movements had to rely on themselves, be more disciplined than the oppressor, and imbue participants with a deep sense of both personal and collective responsibility for their actions. The entirety of the Freedom Movement was a glorious saga of collective Self Help, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Growth, that transformed African Americans, the nation, and the world.¶ ¶ Having nothing to offer a people in dire need of a mass movement against increasingly hostile Power - except bromides, navel-gazing, and "prosperity churches" - the status-quo crowd robs the English vocabulary, expropriating for themselves the terms for all that is virtuous, while risking...nothing. At the desired end of the process, the poor are to be left without even the words to defend themselves. Worse, when you steal people's words, you steal pieces of their minds.¶ ¶ Induced Shame¶ ¶ The self-styled self-helpers thrive on banalities and generalities, through skillful use of which they get applause and "amens" from folks who should know better - who would actually like to confront en masse the real sources of Black economic and social hyper-vulnerability. Chanting the mantras of "self-help," "self-reliance," "self-discipline" and "personal responsibility," they induce group shame - an extremely debilitating, rather than liberating, emotion. (Preachers have long understood that folks will pay good money to be released from shame.) Substantial sections of the audience transfer their shame to the most powerless among them, who become the repositories of all that ails Black America.¶ ¶ John McWhorter, the vile Black servant for the reactionary Manhattan Institute, even blames the poor for the Katrina catastrophe. Under direct questioning from a radio talk show host, just months after the deluge, McWhorter explained the horrors of New Orleans' Coliseum/concentration camp, this way: "What we see in Katrina is single women who also have a great many children."¶ ¶ Such is the logic of the Right, in blackface. It is pointless to spend precious time arguing with these walking pollutants. Instead, let us explore the limits of their narrow definition of Self-Help - a definition that rejects mass action.¶ ¶ True Self-Help¶ ¶ Earlier this year, Black Agenda Report and CBC Monitor circulated a petition with a list of seven demands for presentation to the Congressional Black Caucus. All were rooted in issues that lay at the core of the Historical Black Political Consensus; positions around which many generations of African Americans had coalesced. Most were related to existing legislation before Congress.¶ ¶ 1. Dismantle racially selective mass incarceration.¶ ¶ 2. Aid and empower those dispersed and dispossessed by Katrina.¶ ¶ 3. End the war in Iraq now.¶ ¶ 4. Get the U.S. military out of Africa.¶ ¶ 5. Transform the cities and create millions of jobs.¶ ¶ 6. Establish truly universal, single payer health care.¶ ¶ 7. Ensure voting rights.¶ ¶ Not one of these righteous demands can be accomplished by some diluted, narrow Self-Help as preached by the Cosbys of Black America, and most are actively opposed by Black corporate "conservatives." Churches can and do operate "prison ministries" - a worthy project - but that cannot dismantle an "intake" mechanism that operates at every level of the criminal justice system, from omni-surveillance of poor Black communities to the inevitable result: one million African Americans behind bars.¶ ¶ The crime of Katrina cannot be addressed absent empowerment of residents to direct the spending of many tens of billions of dollars in "reconstruction and return." This requires a national mobilization of millions of Black people to confront Power, directly. Volunteers have already poured in by the tens of thousands, but can only provide some amelioration, as all admit. True Self-Help - decisive help for New Orleans - must come from mass political action.¶ ¶ Local Self-Help groups can counsel limited numbers of returning veterans of the Iraq war, or advise young people not to join the military. But only a mass movement (or inevitable U.S. defeat) can cause the United States to withdraw from Iraq, quit its military buildup in Africa, and cease threatening the survival of the planet.¶ ¶ No amount of community-based resources can revamp urban structures to the benefit of masses of city-dwellers; this is a nation-building task. Black entrepreneurship is an admirable enterprise, but it does not significantly alter relationships of power in a world ruled by multinational corporations. Only People Power can do that, and in the process create the jobs that will sustain the African American presence in the cities.¶ ¶ Community-funded neighborhood clinics save thousands of lives, but none of them pretend to be the solution to Third World-like Black mortality rates. Universal health care can only be won in a twilight struggle with for-profit medical, insurance and drug corporations and their servants in government.¶ ¶ The right to vote must ultimately be ensured by a mass movement that poses a threat to Power that makes fairness at the ballot an attractive trade-off for the current vote-suppressors. Such was the case in the Sixties, and so it remains.¶ ¶ Take Back the Term: Self-Help¶ ¶ The right-wing theft of the term Self-Help is a sacrilege against our heroic dead and Black history, itself. Wasn't Harriet Tubman engaged in Self-Help when she escorted hundreds of slaves out of bondage? Didn't the Pullman Porters exemplify Self-Help in their decades of struggle for recognition as a union - and as men? Were not the young lunch counter integrators involved in Self-Help, as they put their bodies in danger and their academic careers at the mercy of handkerchief-head Black college administrators? Was the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 something other than Self-Help? Who would have done it but ourselves, and the allies we enlisted? Are the youthful Black Panther Party members who aggressively monitored police in Oakland, California, to be expelled from the Self-Help definition? Did scores of Party members die helping other people than their own? Is the fight for a living wage beyond the pale of Cosby and Co.'s Self-Help parameters? Does the mass demonstration at Jena, Louisiana, qualify as Self-Help?