Resident physicians from the Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare will join activist doctors, nurses, and medical students from across the country in Philadelphia tomorrow, May 15 to call for urgent reforms to the nation’s health care system. The group will gather at Independence National Historic Park at 1:30 p.m. Friday on Market between S. 5^th and S. 6^th Streets.

 

From their vantage points on the front lines of the nation’s safety net hospitals, representatives from health care unions and progressive doctors’ organizations will share their insights about what real reform -- that promotes increased access to high quality care -- should look like.

 

“We often think of Pennsylvania as a state with a low rate of uninsured, but nearly 3 million Pennsylvanians under the age of 65 went without health insurance for all or part of 2007 and 2008,” said Marc Stier, PA state director for Health Care for America Now. “We have a serious problem that can't be fixed without nationwide health care reform.”

 

As the debate heats up around the country about how to expand health care access to all, these doctors, med students, nurses and other practitioners are publicly coming forward to support key components of health care reform: providing a public plan option to compete with private insurance, reducing disparities of care based on race or socio-economic background, protecting safety net hospitals, and emphasizing primary care and preventative medicine.

 

“In the absence of reform, we have seen costs spiraling out of control, crushing our patients and their families, not to mention the safety-net hospitals many of us work in,” Dr. Toni Lewis, president of the Committee of Interns and Residents.  “The truth is, giving everyone an insurance card won’t be enough. We need fundamental reform.”

 

Featured speakers from Pennsylvania will include Dr. Valerie Armstead, an anesthesiology professor at Thomas Jefferson University, Deborah Bonn, director of the SEIU Nurse Alliance of Pennsylvania, and Courtney Scubbs, a third-year medical student at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.  They’ll be joined by national leaders of the two major physicians’ unions in the U.S -- the Committee of Interns and Residents, and Doctors Council.

 

 

 

Background Information

 

 Statement of principles:  Following the words of the Preamble, our goals are:

• To establish justice, by eliminating disparities in access and quality of health care resulting in inferior outcomes based on race, ethnicity, language, and culture.
• To ensure domestic tranquility, by adequately funding safety-net hospitals in underserved communities, protecting them from damaging budget cuts at the state and city level, and fighting to prevent hospital closures in overburdened communities during these tough economic times.
• To provide for the common defense against preventable chronic illness by investing in preventative care, patient wellness and prevention programs, children’s health insurance, sufficient staffing, better equipment, health information technology, language services, and medical research.
• To promote the general welfare, by developing a physician workforce that’s representative of the population of the country, making medical school and residency sustainable and affordable for people from all racial and economic backgrounds, and start solving the primary care crisis by a dramatic increase in compensation for primary care physicians.
• And to secure the blessings of good health and liberty to ourselves and our posterity by urging Congress and President Obama to finally pass a comprehensive health care reform bill this year.

Full text of remarks to be delivered at the event are available upon request.

 

 

This event is organized jointly by:  Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare, American Medical Student Association (AMSA), SEIU Healthcare PA, Health Care for America NOW! – PA, Healthcare Equality Project, National Physicians Alliance, Doctors Council/SEIU Healthcare, Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association, Doctors for America, National Doctors Alliance, Student Osteopathic Medical Association, Student National Medical Association and other healthcare workers and advocates.