The Event in Troy, New York

Yesterday, a coalition of  healthcare professionals, unions, and activist groups gathered at the Troy Hilton Garden Inn to picket the annual conference of the New York Health Plan Association, a trade association for the state's health insurance companies. It was frigid out there, but my wife and I were glad we showed up, pickets in hand. We wielded our home-made placards, which read,

BIG PROFIT$

FROM

PAIN?

$HAME 

ON YOU!

and we shouted chants like

HEALTHCARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT --

NOT JUST FOR THE RICH AND WHITE!

Sometimes, in the hope that the the NYHPA would hear us, the Chant Leader aimed his bullhorn up to where they were meeting. They had assembled, after all, mainly to figure out more ways to oppose Single Payer healthcare in New York, by promoting what they called the "realities" of Single Payer.

In the first page of our Press Packet I found the following powerful snippet:

But even more striking was the testimony of a nurse, delivered powerfully through the bullhorn:

"We nurses get to see pain and suffering up close. One day, when I was tending to a patient, I overheard through the partition what was going on with his roommate. This poor man, a truck driver, had a 95% blockage in his heart. His nurses were trying to ready him for the surgery, and they told him that the operating room was being prepared  for him. But he told them that he'd rather not have the surgery because he doubted his insurance would pay for it. They begged him to go through with it: After all this was a life he was talking about -- his own life -- which was priceless. But he said no -- he'd rather leave. And he did -- he just got dressed and walked out the door. I never knew what happened to him."

But my wife and I felt that we knew. Rather than saddle his family with crushing debt, this poor man felt it was better to die. Effectively he was committing suicide.  He felt that he was too poor to live.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously has said that nobody should be too poor to live, and I agree with her. 

After all that, the "big secret" that I touted in yesterday's "teaser" turned out not so important.  But for what it's worth, not only did our group have demonstrators outside, I learned that we had operatives on the inside as well. Through an ingenious scheme that I'm not at liberty to disclose, they found a way to infiltrate the meeting, and some had even volunteered to disrupt the meeting, even though it could mean being arrested. There was even someone appointed to tend to these people should they land in jail!

But so far as I knew, none of this came to pass. The "suits" somehow got wind of the resistance outside, and just to be safe, they ended the meeting an hour early, whereupon a few of our leaders went to the Aetna headquarters in Troy. What happened there I have yet to find out.

There was a brief  break for lunch; our host was a personable young actor and writer. I asked him if he thought this was a class struggle. 

"Certainly I would," he replied. It's been going on for years, but only now are we wising up to it."

"Class warfare?" I offered.

"That, too. People are dying."

Dio

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