Nurses Campaign to Win Medicare for All — Spring Organizing Plan
Medicare for All is a transformative proposal that will dramatically improve the lives of all people in the US. It is going to take a huge movement to win such a prize. Nurses are leaders in this movement because we understand what is at stake: how much we have to lose if health care is left in the hands of corporations and how much we have to gain when health care professionals are given the power and resources to give the care their patients need.
We are building a movement for Medicare for All, and that means deploying different strategies and tactics at different times. We are clear eyed about the challenge in front of us and what we must do. We know that we are not in a position to pass Medicare for All at the federal level tomorrow. We must continue to do the hard work of building support in the House and Senate by putting pressure on strategic members of Congress. At the same time, we must take our fight directly to the corporations that stand in the way of guaranteed health care for all, spreading misinformation among the public and bankrolling politicians to oppose it. And crucially, in order to win, we must continue to build support for Medicare for All across the country and grow our movement. In particular, that means building support among the people hardest hit by the current broken system. We know that we need a truly diverse working class movement to win Medicare for All, and that is what we seek to build.
Our plans for the spring are meant to help our movement build more power than ever before, and we’re going to need your help alongside us in that fight.
Nurses will continue the fight in California
AB 1400, also known as CalCare, was our single-payer guaranteed health care bill that was introduced into the California State Assembly in early 2021. Unfortunately, AB 1400 failed to move forward by its deadline of January 31st. We are obviously deeply disappointed with the outcome but determined to keep moving forward. It is our intention to keep building on this effort and introduce a new bill in next year’s legislative session. The campaign for CalCare saw Medicare for All supporters reach out to millions of people across California to engage them in the political process and rally their support for CalCare. We are proud of the thousands of people who took action with us and the scale of organizing that took place. While we prepare to resume our fight in California next year, we will continue to fight for Medicare for All nationally — because ALL people deserve to get the life-affirming care that they need, when they need it.
Making gains in the House
Together we have won some incredible victories in the last year, and we are building a powerful cadre of support in the House with 121 cosponsors of the Medicare for All bill H.R.1976 — the highest ever level of support for this bill. In early December, we notched another success in one of our priority districts after Rep. John Garamendi in California’s 3rd district agreed to sign on to the bill. This effort shows that grassroots organizing, led locally, with the support of our national movement behind them, can make the difference. Just two months later, Rep. Donald Norcross signed onto the bill in early February, following pressure from constituents in New Jersey. In addition, two new members of Congress elected in special elections signed on in early February: Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Rep. Shontel Brown, who clearly felt — because of the political landscape our movement has created — that signing onto Medicare for All upon being seated was a necessary thing to do.
Getting all these new co-sponsors took a huge amount of effort. But they show that this hard work pays off.
We will continue to pressure our priority elected officials from the fall — Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, OH-03 (Columbus), Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, TX-15 (San Antonio) and Congressman Albio Sires, NJ-08 (Newark). But we are also focusing our organizing power on three new priority districts: Rep. Darren Soto, FL-09 (Orlando), Rep.
Andy Kim, NJ-03 (Burlington County, South-Central Jersey Shore), and Rep. Julia Brownley, CA-26 (Ventura County). These are members of Congress that we believe can be pushed to sign on with the right amount of local organizing and national pressure.
If you live in one of these districts, we need you to step up and get involved in our local organizing efforts. Sign up here and you’ll receive all the materials, training, and support you need to get started. And if you know someone who lives in one of these districts, please pass the form on to them!
Laying the groundwork in the Senate
While our support and momentum in the House continues to grow, we must be clear with ourselves that we need to build more power in the Senate.
In the last session of Congress, the Senate Medicare for All bill had fourteen cosponsors. Our hope is that Senator Bernie Sanders will re-introduce the bill in the next few months. We need to make sure we are ready if that happens. We need to build support in the Senate and lay the groundwork for a big push.
To do this, we’re setting up Senate Organizing Committees in all states with at least one Democratic US Senator. We need people to step up who are willing to take on a leadership role and collaborate on an effort to get one or both of your US Senators to support Medicare for All.
If you live in one of our target states, sign up to join the Senate Organizing Committee in your state. We will connect you with other local Medicare for All champions, and you’ll receive all the materials, training, and support you need to get started.
Medicare for All Fest
Everyone who steps up to lead organizing efforts in our key House districts and Senate states will start immediately doing vital work to build power in their area and put pressure on our elected officials to show their support for Medicare for All. But they can’t do this alone. As a national movement we will support these local organizing efforts and come together on Saturday April 23rd for a virtual “Medicare for All Fest”!
Medicare for All Fest will be a massive virtual Day of Action to bring more visibility and energy to all our local campaigns and provide a chance for people in those areas and across the country to get plugged in.
Taking on our corporate opponents
We will need legislation to enact Medicare for All, but we will also need a head on fight with our corporate opponents if we are to get to a place where passing legislation is possible. In order to win health care as a human right, we have to take our fight directly to the corporations that are spending millions of dollars to try to stop us.
That fight starts with CVS Health and the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future. The Partnership is the most powerful dark-money lobbying group trying to block Medicare for All. And CVS Health, now the largest health care corporation in the world, is their largest single known donor to date.
We are challenging CVS repeatedly and publicly and demanding that they publicly cut ties with the Partnership. We will be turning up the heat over the next few months in the build up to the biggest day in the corporate calendar, CVS’s annual shareholder meeting.
The next stage for our campaign this spring is a national art contest. CVS has tried to rebrand itself as a corporation that cares about their customers’ health and that can be trusted with increasingly more aspects of our health care. But if they really cared about patients more than profits, they wouldn’t be working to block Medicare for All.
We are calling on all artists and creatives in the movement to help take CVS’s logo, slogan, and other aspects of their branding and create art that shows CVS for what they really are: a company profiteering from people’s pain while spending millions to keep our health care system dysfunctional.
You can find out more about the art contest and get involved here.
We’re specifically looking for visual art pieces that can be used as posters and postcards. This art will become a powerful tool of protest which we will use to target their HQ and their stores in the build up to their shareholder meeting in May.
Building the movement we need to win
All our efforts — to pressure politicians and to take on our corporate opponents — rely on building a powerful grassroots movement. That means building widespread support in the public and building a core of committed activists who are willing to do the hard work to win.
To be truly powerful, this movement must include and represent all working people. It is essential that we are building a diverse multicultural movement. We are working to make that happen, and we need your help.
If we want to win health care as a human right, one thing is clear: we must consistently center the communities most directly and harshly impacted by our broken system. We are trying to do that in two ways: first, through our Medicare para Todos program, and second, through our webinars on how Medicare for All will help tackle racial health disparities.
Our Medicare para Todos program engages native Spanish speakers. Through our texting program so far, we’ve successfully sent over 400,000 texts to Spanish-speaking voters in California to identify supporters and plug them into our campaign. We are now preparing to launch a Spanish-language Call Team to call Spanish-speaking supporters of Medicare for All to further engage them in our campaign.
If you are a fluent Spanish speaker we need you to get involved. You can use this form to sign up to join our Texting Team, our Call Team, or both!
We are also running English and Spanish language webinars on the racial disparities of the current system and the ways that Medicare for All would seek to address them. You can sign up for an English language webinar here and a Spanish webinar here. Our staff is also available to present these webinars — in English or Spanish — to partner organizations that work directly with communities of color — so get in touch if that is you.
Forward to Medicare for All
We believe that these strategic pillars — building our movement, focusing on specific elected officials in the House and Senate, and taking on our corporate opponents — will help move us closer to our goal of health care justice for all. We know that change as big as that which we are demanding is not easy, but we know that there is no force as strong as people united together in a fight for justice. Nurses never give up. We are in this fight until we win. We are honored to work alongside you in this movement for justice. Onward!
