On May 2nd, the one year anniversary of the closing of the Crozer health system, several dozen community members gathered at Chester Friends Meeting to share a cookout and potluck meal together, hosted by members of the Put People First! PA (PPF-PA) Southeast PA Healthcare Rights Committee. We came together to eat, sing, to share stories about the impact of the closure of the Crozer system, to study the healthcare crisis in our communities and to talk about how we can come together to fight the closing of hospitals and for our human right to healthcare in Delaware country, in Southeast PA and across our state and country.

We opened the evening by sharing our stories. The stories shared were devastating and powerful and a reminder that across all of our differences, our needs and our stories of struggling to survive in this profit and greed based healthcare system unite us, as does our commitment to fight for our families, our communities and our human right to healthcare.

We heard from one family where two generations were born in the Crozer system. A mother who was born at Crozer Chester writes, “ Both of my children were born at Crozer hospitals that are now closed, so they hold a special place in my heart… healthcare is a human right and should be denied to nobody. So much is lost with the closure of hospitals like Crozer.”

And a community resident who is a survivor of multiple cancers whose life has been saved multiple times by Planned Parenthood and by Medicaid shared their story and said that “the gutting of Planned Parenthood and medicaid is mass murder.”

Another community member who lives in the area served by Crozer Chester wrote, “I have heart disease and I am constantly worried about if I would make it to a hospital or not (since Crozer closed) if something happens to my heart.”

We mourned those who have died over the last year because of the closing of the Crozer hospitals, and because of the denial of the human right to healthcare in our country. We expressed our anger at this unnecessary death and suffering that only exists because of greed and because we live in a country and system that values profit for a few over the lives of all of our people. We affirmed that it doesn’t have to be this way and that we can and must organize to change it.

We wrote our stories on cards to share with our state representatives at our upcoming advocacy day “Crowd the Capitol” in Harrisburg on June 8th. Frequently those in power say that they don’t know what people are suffering, so we are gathering hundreds of stories on Legislative Cards to deliver on June 8th, so that no one who is supposed to represent us can say that they don’t know what we are going through.

You can share your story here: https://bit.ly/CrowdTheCapitolPPF

Feeling connected and grounded in our healthcare stories, leaders of Put People First! PA (PPF-PA) then led a teach-in about health and healthcare conditions in our region and beyond. Leaders of PPF-PA from our Southeast PA Healthcare Rights Committee talked about the dismantling of the Crozer system by the private equity firm Prospect Medical Holdings, and its devastating impact on our county and region.

We then covered the status report on healthcare rebuild plans, involving new profiteers like Chariot Allaire Partners, Independence Blue Cross and KQT Aikens Partners. Check out this link to learn more about what these various for profit and “non-profit” profiteers are aiming to create and how these will compare to the services Crozer previously offered or what Delco needs. We studied broader healthcare trends and talked about how our for-profit healthcare system based in the interest of Wall Street and not the interests of people, our health and communities, kills people and destroys our health and our communities.

Finally we discussed how the only way to stop the mass murder caused by hospital closures and the many other ways that our right to healthcare is denied is to organize, unite and develop leaders. Put People First! PA is committed to building a massive politically independent movement by the poor of all backgrounds, following in the footsteps of the Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King was building when he was killed. We read this quote by King:

“There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”

We committed ourselves to becoming that “unsettling force” to build this movement.

We sang our movement song, “I went Down to the Rich Man’s House and I Took Back What he Stole from Me,” (see video on this post) and closed with a commitment to organize and unite across all of our differences to build a movement to confront the power of Wall Street in our health care and to fight for our human rights to health care and to all of our needs.

– Jen, Southeast PA Healthcare Rights Committee member