(Following up on this post and this one in the series)

The second of my chosen areas of emphasis is getting Single Payer Health Care more into the public awareness and mainstream thinking, and, of course, ultimately to get HR 676 or something very like it passed into law in this country.

DCBlogger and hipparchia have done an excellent job keeping us up-to-date on the issue, so I won't even attempt to duplicate their efforts here: just follow the relevant tags.

I will report on the Healthcare-Now! Rally for HR 676 which took place last Thursday in Times Square. and some of my thoughts coming out of that rally. And, of course, photos! (Not very many this time because my batteries ran out.)

We met near Times Square for about an hour, speechifying, chanting, and handing out flyers, then marched to the headquarters of GHI for the end of the rally.

One weird moment happened as we passed by a Conde-Nast event of some kind taking place at a hotel along the way. The photographers and others hanging around outside the hotel looked at us and our signs, obviously not too closely, and someone shouted "Yeah, down with Prop 8!". Hmm. This compounded the feeling I had all during the rally that people passing by were not very clear on what it was we were demonstrating about. I would like to know what the people passing out flyers thought after talking to people.

The Gray Panthers were a large presence at the rally, and it seemed to me that the average age of those attending was over 40 if not over 50 - not to say that there were no young people there, there certainly were, but the age distribution was definitely skewed to the upper end. That may also have has something to do with the timing of the rally, see next paragraph.

There were, by my crude estimates, about 150 people there at the height of the rally - not bad for an awkward time (4 - 6 PM) of a rainy day, but I would have loved to see the kind of crowd the NYCCLC turned out against the bailout on short notice. And that brings me to my first question, which was echoed by a speaker from the UFT retirees section: Where are the Unions? There were union members there to be sure (me, for example!) but no big Union presences.

My own Union had scheduled a meeting (on changes to their constitution) for the same time as this rally was taking place.

And this is weird to me, because our Union, if not every Union in the nation, should be urgently pushing for this bill, not only for its own merits, but because health insurance is an issue that causes enormous problems every time we have to negotiate a contract, especially so in the economic climate we now face. We've just ratified one contract and we're moving into negotiating the next. The Union Welfare Fund, which pays for health insurance for adjuncts and dental coverage for full-time faculty, is financially strapped and under pressure. The rest of our coverage comes through a hodgepodge of City and State sources. All of it ultimately tax or tuition dollars.

PSC-CUNY and our parent union, AFT, have endorsed HR 676. But what does this endorsement mean if we aren't working to get the word out to our members and to the communities we live in?

I just don't get it.

So one thing on my "work to do" list is to sit down with my Union Rep and find out what I can about the local's position (if any) on this. Perhaps a letter to the editor or (maybe?) an article in the Union newspaper? And then?

[Updated as I write: I have received information that there is a mention of HR 676 in the new issue of our newspaper. I'll have to look for it. Encouraging news, depending on how much of a mention it is. But still, shouldn't we be hitting the streets or the keyboards at least?]

I have more thoughts about the rally itself, perhaps for another post....