Support Keith’s VT Workers' Center Fundraiser

Most people would agree that our healthcare system is a mess. And a tragedy. 

It’s not just absurdly long wait times to schedule an appointment. I’ve seen way too many GoFundMes for neighbors and friends battling cancer or recovering from injury. Heard too many stories of people dodging debt collectors from a surprise medical bill for something as mundane as an x-ray. I know far too many young people who go without necessary mental health care, or are managing chronic conditions on their own because their insurance plan doesn’t cover those services.

As a parent of two young kids, I’ve also faced this system: forcing our newborn, for example, to gag and cry twice a day for a week straight before the doctor informed us we were “now eligible for our insurance to cover the kid version of the medicine since our child rejected the generic adult brand.”

It’s not ok. And it’s getting worse — insurance costs are rising, hospitals serving low-income and rural regions are closing, and policy-makers are moving to privatize Medicare and cut 24 million people, in the past year alone, off of Medicaid. 

Behind every one of these injustices is a for-profit health insurance industry pushing for privatization and delivering, in most cases, great returns to Wall Street investors. A pharmaceutical industry raking in profits thanks to subsidized research and development at our universities. Hospital networks beholden to, or in the case of Steward Health Care in Massachusetts, outright owned by financiers. And a tax system designed to let billionaires off the hook, denying huge sums of money that could be used to build out a modern system of high-quality primary and preventative healthcare. 

Addressing the healthcare crisis is a question of power and political will. Wall Street and the major healthcare industry players run the table in Congress — and for the most part, in our state governments too. Stopping these violations of our human right to healthcare, the impacts of which cascade across our society, will require political organization, on a massive scale, and led by those of us most impacted by the crisis. 

That’s why I’ve been active with the Vermont Workers’ Center’s Healthcare is a Human Right Campaign since 2012 — just after we won a historic victory in passing the nation’s first state-based universal healthcare law, a promise yet to be fulfilled in reality. 

We’re organizing, every day, across the state of Vermont to achieve the power and momentum needed to take on the healthcare industry. We’re building, state-by-state, the Nonviolent Medicaid Army as a national vehicle to coordinate the fight for healthcare. And we’re mobilizing, in 2024 and beyond, with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, a broad based movement led by the poor fighting to end poverty, systemic racism, militarism, the denial of healthcare, ecological devastation, and the false moral narrative of white Christian nationalism.

For 12 years I’ve been spending my evenings and weekends, now with kids, in meetings, at demonstrations, in studies of US movement history, because this denial of healthcare and our human rights is quite literally killing us. “Policy murder,” as the Poor People’s Campaign says. 

The Vermont Workers’ Center is a largely member-run organization with a small staff, but we do have expenses. If you’re in a position to contribute and help us continue this work, please consider making a donation to our fundraiser in any amount and spreading the word to friends. Lots of love and appreciation for taking the time to read this. Let’s do it!