Labor Campaign Pushes Healthcare as a Human Right, Not a Business | The Nation

Labor Campaign Pushes Healthcare as a Human Right, Not a Business | The Nation:

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The unionists gathered over the weekend at the Labor Campaign for Single-Payer conference in Chicago argue that if universal health care is ever to be achieved in the US, labor must play a key role in pushing for it—which many have plans to do, particularly on the state level, in the near future.

The LCSP was founded in 2009 by a broad group of union activists, including Mark Dudzic, a former union local president, and longtime labor organizer and rabble-rouser Jerry Tucker. Tucker, who died late last year and was commemorated Friday by the campaign, was a stalwart organizer at the rank-and-file level, having little interest in the shifts of power in labor’s upper echelons. That spirit clearly still animates the campaign; attendees seemed to see the hopes for single-payer to come not from on high, but through organizing at labor’s grassroots.

Campaign activists, like many on the left, acknowledged the Affordable Care Act’s positive outcomes like some expanded coverage and the expansion of Medicaid while arguing it does not go nearly far enough in its reforms. Dudzic, the national coordinator of the campaign, says that labor and the progressive movement face a pivotal choice after the ACA has been cemented as the law of the land.