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HEALTH CARE FOR AMERICA NOW
NEW YORK CITY ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Statement by Mark Hannay, Director
at “The Dream Lives On:
Together We Walk, United We Stand for Health Care for All”
August 29, 2009
Times Square, New York City
Welcome to “The Dream Lives On: United We Stand for Health Care for All”, a gathering for New Yorkers from all across our region to converge in unity for health care for all in America. We are also coming together today to remember the life of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the cause of his life: universal health care.
My name is Mark Hannay. I wear several professional hats these days: I’m Director of the Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign. I co-lead Health Care for America Now’s New York City Organizing Committee. I help lead our statewide coalition Health Care for All New York. And I co-chair the national Universal Health Care Action Network.
But I’m taking off all my hats now, and want to talk to you as one New Yorker to another, and briefly tell you my story, just as you’ll hear the stories of other New Yorkers today.
Senator Ted Kennedy introduced his first universal health care bill in Congress in 1970. I was 15 years old, living upstate in a suburb of Rochester. I didn’t have any awareness then about health care politics and policy.
But my mother was a juvenile diabetic, who usually had to be hospitalized two or three times a year for some medical crisis or another. She had to inject herself with insulin twice a day, sometimes with my help when she couldn’t find a patch of skin that wasn’t hardened from numerous shots. There wasn’t a week that went by in her life when she didn’t experience hypoglycemia at least once, and she always carried an orange in her pocketbook. I remember the first time my father told me he felt lucky to have good family coverage through his job, so that Mom could get the health care she needed. I remember when he told me that she wouldn’t be able to get insurance on her own, simply because she was a diabetic. When I asked him why, he simply said, “because that’s the way it is..” His answered seemed unfair, and just not right to me then.
Flash forward 23 years. It’s 1993, I’m 38, and I’m now living and working in New York City. I’m a member of ACT UP/New York and working at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, trying to do everything we can to make sure people living with HIV and AIDS at that time could get and keep good insurance coverage here in New York. President Clinton had just been elected, we had hope, and Teddy Kennedy was at is side, still leading the fight in the U.S. Senate for health care for all. Unfortunately, that effort didn’t succeed, but 3 years later, Senator Kennedy led the successful fight to establish the State Child Health Insurance Program, and now millions of formerly uninsured children can see a doctor and get their vaccinations for school.
Now, it’s 2009, and I guess you at the age of 54 you could call me a health care veteran. But the good news is that things are far different now than back when I was 15 in 1970.
We are closer now than we have ever been before to guaranteeing comprehensive, quality, affordable health care for all in America. We have a bigger movement for health care reform than we have ever had before, including many 15-year olds in upstate New York and all across our nation. We stand here today in Times Square –hundreds if not thousands of New Yorkers-- and millions of Americans join with us in spirit and solidarity to say “NOW is the time for health care for all. Finally,… NOW is the time!”
We are able to do this because we are all standing on the shoulders of giants like Senator Edward Kennedy, and many, many hundreds of other lesser known Americans who have worked tirelessly for almost a century now in the struggle for health care justice in America.
Who are we all now? We are 450,000 doctors, we are hundreds of religious congregations, we are millions of trade unionists, we are a new generation of young Americans, we are a generation of wise elders, we are men and women of every station, we are small business owners struggling to make a living and cover our employees, we are newcomers striving for the American dream of opportunity, equality, and justice. In sum, we are New York, and we are America, and we are all standing up together for health care for all.
We’ve come too far to turn back now. Our movement for health care justice is now too big and too strong, and “yes we can” make change a reality.
When Congress reconvenes down in Washington, DC in two weeks, on the first day back, everyone one will offer tributes to Senator Kennedy’s fight for health care justice. All of these tributes will be well-deserved. We mourn that he could not be with us to finish the job. But rest assured and in peace, Senator Kennedy …we will get it done!
The next day we’ve all got to start asking our Senators and Representatives, “Where’s Senator Kennedy’s universal health care bill? Where is the Kennedy Health Care bill?
Our job now is to pick up the torch. Our job now is to push onward to make Senator Kennedy’s health care bill the law of the land. Finally,… health care for all in America.
Senator Kennedy himself spoke these words just down the street from here on August 12, 1980, some 29 years ago. They are his legacy to us.
“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
We’re going to make that dream happen in 2009.
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