Medical Tent Proposal

Remember the simple, inconspicuous medical tent that Liberty Square demonstrators stopped N.Y.P.D. from taking down in the middle of the night?  When Reverend Jesse Jackson came by in the wee hours to link arms with that heroic group standing up for medical care for all?

Courtesy of Animal

Photographer:  Becky Turco

Occupy Wall Street stops N.Y.P.D.

from removing the medical tent.

Courtesy of Animal

Photographer: Bucky Turco

The Reverend Jesse Jackson links arms
with OWS demonstrators

to stop the removal of the medical tent

That was around October 19th-20th.

Here's a peek at what was typically going on inside that medical tent, from a Common Dreams article by Mary O'Brien, M.D.on why we need a single payer health care system in the United States.

Courtesy of Common Dreams

Photographer:  John Minchello/AP

Medical workers in Liberty Square

medical tent give people free flu shots.

As shown as one example in the photo above, medical workers gave out free flu shots, an activity the article's author participated in. 

I found myself thinking:  what a shining example of how simple it should be in a modern, industrialized society for people to get something as sane and public health minded as flu shots.  Need a flu shot?  Just walk over and get one.  How about if you're a senior without the money for a shingles innoculation?  What if your child needs something?

How much money did Occupy Wall Street save the U.S. that day - and simply by preventing untold cases of the common flu?

Even if you don't want to look at this problem from the plain moral point of view, that is.  Just social practicality - the photo reportedly taken only days before Mayor Bloomberg had the entire camp evicted in yet another Kafkaesque (sadly, increasingly American) police state power display (we are hearing about more frequently - the sailing banner saluted and waved in the breeze by our nation's mayors upon chummy conference call).

I'd guess many of you reading know the facts reported, yet again, by another reality-please pleading article.  How a Harvard study shows that 45,000 Americans die every year because they lack adequate access to health care;  how "unchecked corporate greed" trumps and tramples human need, or, as Mary O'Brien, M.D. inquires:  "Need I recite the billions in profits these companies make each year, or the outlandish salaries of their CEOs, based on skyrocketing premiums and denials of care?"

Even people with insurance face formidable barriers to care like rising co-pays and deductibles. As a result, they are putting off care, getting sicker and ending up in our emergency rooms with serious complications – often facing crushing medical bills later.

This increased “cost sharing” by patients helps explain this week’s report by U.S. Health and Human Services showing the use of medical services has slowed. People can't afford it. 

But lack of care invites serious illness or worse. That’s part of the reason why I and scores of other doctors, nurses, medical students and social workers came down to Zuccotti Park and volunteered our time to give out free flu shots.

But I confess that my desire to help went beyond the Samaritan impulse of preventing illness and aiding the sick, an impulse that, remarkably, still persists among our nation’s health professionals despite the toxic atmosphere of our for-profit health system.
I and many others were impelled to take action because the Occupy movement struck a chord with us. We’re angry that our health economy – like the overall economy – has more than sufficient resources to take care of all of us, but the resources are siphoned off by profit-driven corporations in the interest of “the 1 percent.”

Every advanced, civilized nation on the planet - except the United States - provides universal health care.  So here is my proposal for where OWS goes next:  even if people aren't going to put sleeping tents back in the public square, let's put the medical tents back up or up for the first time if your city or town didn't, and join arms in a 24/7 circle around those tents while people go in and out for free medical care unimpeded by any inteference sent by the 1%.

I'll volunteer my time to do watch shifts.  Now that's community service!

More information here and here and here on opening up an improved Medicare for the entire country. 

As Dr. Martin Luther King stated, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and most inhumane."  So for Dr. King's birthday this year, let's reoccupy Wall Street across the nation by putting medical tents back up 24/7 in the public square.  And let's pass a sane and humane national health care bill like H.R. 676.

More o.s.r. blogging here on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations for single payer.  Occupy health care.  Health care is a human right.