Dear PNHP physicians, medical students and far-flung friends,

A new bill for single payer will be introduced in Congress on Tuesday, February 4 (press release to follow).

We thank all the members of the Physicians Working Group for Single Payer for all their hard work on this project, as well as Rep. John Conyers, a lifelong advocate in the Congress for health and human rights, and his staffer, Joel Segal.

There are three things you can do to help in the coming weeks.

1) Contact your member of Congress and encourage them to be a co-sponsor of this legislation. If they sign on today, they can still be an “original” co-sponsor and their name will be permanently attached to the bill. The Congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

2) Encourage physicians and medical students to individually endorse the “Physicians and Medical Students Proposal for NHI” If you have access to any e-mail lists at your hospital, medical school, etc. please circulate the summary and endorsement form.

3) Encourage any civic, consumer, church, or other grassroots or allied professional groups you belong to to endorse the new single-payer bill. A new web site, Coalition for a National Health Program is being constructed to keep an ongoing list of endorsements. Please bookmark it.

Thank you for your continued support. Although the war and the shuttle disaster are making headlines, we hope to offer the press some good news to cover as well.

Ida Hellander, MD
Executive Director
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP)
29 E Madison, Suite 602
Chicago, IL 60602
312.782.6006
fax 312.782.6007
pnhp e-mail

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 3, 2003
11:00 a.m

Physicians Propose Solution to Rising Health Care Costs and Uninsured
Introduce National Health Insurance Bill in Washington, D.C.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A group of the nation’s most prominent physicians and progressive leaders of Congress will hold a press conference briefing Tuesday, February 4, 11am, 2226 Rayburn House Office Building, to unveil a new bill, The United States National Health Insurance Act, a single-payer national health program. The legislation proposes an effective mechanism for controlling skyrocketing health costs while covering all 42 million uninsured Americans. The bill also restores free choice of physician to patients and provides comprehensive prescription drug coverage to seniors, as well as
younger people.

“Good news,” says Dr. Quentin Young, convener of the physician panel. “There is now a way to exit the nightmare of a collapsing health system. We no longer have to put up with the outrageous costs that keep millions of Americans from receiving medical care and needed medications. Nor will tens of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy over medical bills.

Universal national health insurance (single payer) takes the resources we have in place and deals with them in an intelligent manner, excluding the tragic hemorrhage of resources into non-health entities”.

Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine*, is the spokesperson for the Physicians Working Group on Single-Payer National Health Insurance, an ad-hoc collaboration of the nation’s top physicians. Dr. Angell will present the proposal at the briefing.

Other members of the group include Dr. Gerald Thomson and Dr. Christine Cassel, former Presidents of the American College of Physicians, the second largest medical association in the country; Dr. Rodney Hood and Dr. Gary Dennis, former Presidents of the National Medical Association; Dr. Elinor Christiansen, immediate Past-President of the American Medical Women’s Association; and Dr. Ron Anderson, CEO of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

(*Affiliations for identification only. A full list of Working Group members is at the end of this release).

Representative John Conyers, Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and ranking minority Member of the House Judiciary Committee will introduce The United States National Health Insurance Act on February 4. A long time advocate of national health insurance, Rep. Conyers closely collaborated with the Physicians Working Group on the bill.

Additionally, nearly 4,000 individual physicians have endorsed the physicians’ proposal including two former Surgeons General (Dr. David Satcher and Dr. Julius Richmond); a Nobel Laureate (Dr. Bernard Lown); the highly respected authors of major textbooks of surgery and family practice (Dr. William Silen and Dr. Robert Rakel, respectively); and a leading organizer of emergency services in NYC on 9/11(Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, Chairman of Emergency Medicine at New York University).

Also joining the physicians and Congressmen to endorse the National Health Insurance Act will be Dr. Maya Rockeymoore, Urban League Director of Health Policy; Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research; and Hillary Shelton, a spokesperson for Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP.

Original Congressional co-sponsors of the NHI bill at press time are:

Luis Guitierrez (IL), Jim McDermott (WA); Bobby Scott (VA); Donna Christensen (Virgin Islands); Barbara Lee (CA); Danny Davis (IL); Major Owens (NY); Jesse Jackson Jr.(IL); Maurice Hinchey (NY); Donald Payne (NJ); Elijah Cummings (MD); Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI); Alcee Hastings (FL); Chaka Fattah (PA); Ed Towns (NY); John Lewis (GA); BennieThompson (MS); Eleanor Holmes-Norton (delegate for DC), and Lou Grijalva (AZ) (listing in formation).

National Health Insurance Act Press Conference
February 4, 2003 11am
2226 Rayburn House Office Building, Judiciary Committee Room

*Physician Working Group Members

Marcia Angell, MD
Spokesperson
Past Editor
New England Journal of Medicine

Quentin Young, MD
Convener
National Coordinator PNHP
Former President American Public Health Association

Joel Alpert, MD
Former President
American Academy of Pediatrics

Ron Anderson, MD
President and CEO
Parkland Health &Hospital System

Peter Beilenson, MD, MPH
Commissioner
Department of Health, Baltimore

Christine Cassell, MD
Former President
American College of Physicians
Dean, Oregon University School of Medicine

Elinor Christiansen, MD
Past President
American Medical Women’s
Association

Olveen Carrasquillo, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Columbia School of Medicine
Advisory Committee Member
National Hispanic Medical Assn.
Gary Dennis, MD
Former President
National Medical Association

David Himmelstein, MD
Associate Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Co-Founder, Physicians for a National Health Program

Rodney Hood, MD
Past President of the National Medical Association which represents
African-American physicians

Edith Rasell, MD, PhD
Minister for Labor Relations in Community and Economic Development for
the United Church of Christ

Helen Rodriguez-Trias, MD
Past President
American Public Health Association
(recently deceased)

Sindhu Srinivas, MD
Past President
American Medical Student Assn.

Gerald Thomson, MD
Former President
American College of Physicians

Walter Tsou, MD, MPH
Former Commissioner of Health,
Philadelphia

Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School

III World Social Forum: Another world is possible

II International Forum for the Advocacy of Peoples’ Health as an Essential Human Need, a Citizenship Right and a Public Good

Porto Alegre – RS – Brasil
January 20th – 23rd, 2003
Organization:
Asociación Latinoamericana de Medicina Social – ALAMES
International Peoples’ Health Council – IPHC
International Association of Health Policy – IAHP
Peoples’ Health Movement – PHM
Centro Brasileiro de Estudos em Saúde -CEBES
Secretaria Municipal de Saúde – SMS/PMPA
Prefeitura Municipal de Porto Alegre
Rede Brasileira de Cooperação em Emergências – RBCE
Subscription list is open for entities which want to act as organizers or supporters for the event.

Background:

Four hundred participants of the I International Forum for the Advocacy of Peoples’ Health, performed in Porto Alegre on January 2002, soon before the II World Social Forum (WSF), recommended the accomplishment of II International Forum for the Advocacy of Peoples’ Health preceding the III WSF in January 2003. This will allow a widened participation of all those interested, a preparation of the contributions on health issues for the III WSF, and, at the same time, to raise health theme to apower in the several activities within the WSF itself.
Conclusions of the I International Forum, attached to this letter, summarize the objective and the motivation for this II Forum, where we want to build an International Agenda on the Defense of the Health Right, as well as to launch the basis for an international call for the accomplishment of the I World Forum for the Advocacy of Health in Porto Alegre – Brazil, in the first semester of 2004.

Target public for this International Forum:

Social and political movements in general, concerned and/or active on people and collectivities’ right to health, such as Peasants’ Movement, Landless People Movement, Factory Workers, Services Workers, Teachers, Education Workers, Advocacy for Children and Adolescents, For Peace, Against Violence, Political Movements and Parties, Youth Movements, Ecological Movements, for Sanitation and Urban and Rural Development, for Free Sexual Option, for Public Security, for Safe Traffic, for Safe and Protector of Life Communities, Mental Health Movements, Student Movements in general, Journalists, Artists, Culture Workers, members of Religious Movements, Ethnical Movements, Afro and Indigenous People… that is, all those interested in establishing and fighting for an ANTI-NEOLIBERAL POLITICS, FOR THE ADVOCACY OF HEALTH AS A SOCIAL AND CITIZENSHIP RIGHT, TASK OF THE STATE AND A PUBLIC GOOD.

Objectives of the II International Forum for the Defense of the Peoples’ Health:

• To build and to spread an enlarged perception of health as an indispensable element for social justice in the world, perceiving health as a right and as na endowment for each citizen and each collectivity.
• To accompplish a critical analysis, analysing alternatives and proposing ways to overcome neoliberal principles in health, making them known and making suitable the ways used by successful experiences in the affirmation of an universality of rights with the construction of social equity.
• To introduce or strengthen the theme of right to health in the agendas of social movements in general and governments and to insert social movements in general in the fight for health, adopting its wide and definition of human need and quality of life, where every one will identify with a theme which does not belong only to specialists, but pertains to the universe of needs and desires of all human beings.
• To produce spaces of reflexion through working groups whose participants belong to different movements, and which main objective or reason is not health, to share with their interlocutors this double construction. Its object for fight – be it the rights of indigenous peoples, children and adolescents, women, elderly, ethnical minorities, for sexual option, for access to land, for access to work, for access to housing, … or even more general fight movements, as political parties and movements, unions, peasants, students, teachers, community associations… can be seen in their specific themes as well as embracing the theme of right to health, under a perspective of participation in the building of an universal social right to health, as a human being, as a right of citizenship and as a public good.
• To build a political agenda for construction and diffusion of a political reason and the universal right to health, with the definition of spaces for articulation between different political and social movements, as well as together with socially commited governments to generate answers to the needs of population.
• To structure in a participatory way the Call and the organization of the program to the I World Forum for the Right to Health and in Advocacy of the peoples’ health in 2004 in Porto Alegre.
• To facilitate the vision of health policies and systems which are not oriented by neoliberalism, making known and concrete the Unified health System – SUS – in Porto Alegre and in Rio Grande do Sul, under the context of building a national SUS, also bringing other Brazilian SUS experiences for knowledgement, stimulating this kind of focus and alternative agenda for those countries which face the challenges of building appropriate and social security and health systems according to the principle of health as an universal social right, a duty of the State and co-responsibility of society.
• To establish universality with equity as a big concreteness of the right to health expressed in equity of health conditions, in access to services and in the distribution of resources and opportunities.
• To adopt the promotional quality of life strategy, overcoming the mere assistencialism, guiding health care to another direction of individuals and their collectivities’s autonomy and establishing a transdisciplinar and transectorial relationship on quality of life and health.

Methodology of the Forum:

To build a general reference for the debate through Panels, ordering general questions to be answered and the existing positions in the field of analysis and proposals. To develop sessions in the form of Working Groups where organizations and particpants of different social movements will be able to present their positions about four questions:

1. which is the focus of the agenda in your political and social movement and which is the space and characteristics of the presence of Health as a Right in your current Agenda?
2. which are the characteristics that should be adopted by the fight for health, which is your agenda and which are the strategies to be successful in this fight? Which are the reference experiences in this field?
3. which are the interests, opportunities and barriers to be overcome to introduce the health theme as a Social Right in the Agenda of different social movements and how could this movement engage itself in the more general fight for Health as a Social Right.
4. how to structure and operate the call and the conducting of the I World Forum for the encourage the organization of regional and/or national preparatory Forums.

These questions will be developed in Working groups, according to the dynamics adopted by indicated Coordinators and the group itself, assuring the expression of all in their positions’s presentations and soon consolidating in the debate a collective position to be presented to the General Plenary at the end of each day. General recommendations and joint working goals – Political Integrated Agenda, will be adopted at the Final Session, based on reports and its final outcome.
After the II International Forum, during the 23rd of January, site visits and lectures about the Unified Health System will be organized allowing people to know Porto Alegre’s SUS. On subscription, those interested should express their theme preferences in order to know our SUS.

Program:

January 20th, 2003
8:00 AM – Participants ??????
8:30 AM – Official Opening Ceremony
9:00 AM – Panel of Analysis of the International Situation of Peoples’s Health, of States Reforms, of Social and Political Movements and the Right to Health, instituting a critical focus on advances and retrocedings in the warranty of the right to health, situating health theme under the context of political agendas of governments and society. This Panel will try to trace a comprising view, covering all regions of the planet.
11:00 AM – Debate with the audience
12:30 – Lunch
2 PM – Working Groups, discussing about the two initial questions
5:00 PM – Information and Analysis about Social and Political Experience of SUS – Unified health System – in Brazil. Elements to Understand Porto Alegre’s Experience.
6:30 PM – Presentation of discussions in each Group of themes 1 and 2.
7:00 PM – Artistic acitivities
7:30 PM – Closing of the day

January 22nd, 2003

8:30 AM – Panel about alternatives for the development of health agendas in the scope of local / department / state / and national governments of social movements in general and in the form of these governments and movements to sum to for the building of a Political Agenda in Defense of Health as a Social Right. The role of international cooperation, North-South and South-South. Examples of success in the definition and development of social agendas in defense of the right to health. Discussion.
11:00 AM – Discussions with the audience
12:30 – Lunch
2:00 PM – Working Groups, themes 2 and 3
5:00 PM – Planary session: Synthesis of the recommendations of groups and discussion about how to ???????? this fight around an International Agenda for Defense of Health as a Social Right. Preliminary composition of recommendations and organization of actions for the Agenda in Defense of the Right to Health.
6:30 PM – Closing of the day’s activities
8:30 PM – Dinner for the Health of People, by adhesion

January 23rd, 2003
9:00 AM – Panel with a report of experience of organization and mobilization of the Assembly for the Health of the People in Bangladesh, of the World Social Forums and the World Education Forums, reports of other experiences of international mobilization. Reflexion about the role of events in the political mobilization. Initial ordering of an agenda of themes and initiatives which will take us to the organization of a I World Forum for the Right of health in 2004.
11:00 AM – Discussion with the audience
12:30 – Lunch
2:00 PM – ?????, theme 4. Conclusions and recommendations of each Group.
4:30 PM – Final Plenary Session: Approval of the Final report with the observations and recommendations of the event and with the proposal of a general program and strategies for the call and structure of organization for the I World Forum for the Right to Health. Definition of communication strategies about the theme Health and the conclusions of this II International Forum within the III World Social Forum. Approval of the International Agenda for the Advocacy of the Right to Health.
6:30 PM – Official closing of the II Forum.
9:30 PM – Party

January 23rd, 2003
9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Optional activity post International Forum to visit and to know SUS – Unified Health System – in the city of Porto Alegre in sectors where the participants are interested on.

Information and Subscriptions:

Secretaria Municipal de Saúde de Porto Alegre
Av. João Pessoa, 325 – centro – Porto Alegre – RS – Brazil
CEP 90040-000

Telephone: (+55) 51 3289 2833, 3289 2859, 3289 2850
Fax: (+55) 51 3289 2827, 3289 2841
E-mail: joser@sms.prefpoa.com.br armandon@portoweb.com.br, ananyr@sms.prefpoa.com.br
alames@movinet.com.uy

On behalf of the Organizing Committee:
Armando De Negri Filho
General Coordinator of the Latin American Association of Social Medicine – ALAMES

When you send you subscription, please inform:

Name, entity or movement you are a member of, explaining its field of activities, position, mail address for institutional mailing, telephone, fax and e-mail. Please indicate which is your field of interest for site visits in Porto Alegre.

Subscriptions and information by Internet:
For subscriptions for the II International Forum for the Defense of Peoples’ Health, use the mail: assepla@sms.prefpoa.com.br

Please pay attention to the subscription at the III World Social Forum and for the subscription of activities of your institution / organization (in this case, until December 6th, 2002): Subscription
e-mail

As well as through the mail:
fsm-hospedagem@smic.prefpoa.com.br information about hosting