Put People First! PA welcomes the passage of HB 1460 from committee in the PA House, a bill which takes a step toward more accountability for Wall Street private equity firms that run our hospitals into the ground, then close them and put our families’ lives at risk.
The closure of the Crozer Chester system is devastating for Southeast PA communities. Sadly, the Southeast region is not unique. Private equity, nonprofit and for-profit owners closed 26 hospitals in all regions of PA in just the last five years.
It’s a positive sign that lawmakers from both parties are beginning to agree with our calls for accountability for non-profits like UPMC and Geisinger as well as for-profits and private equity.
HB 1460 extends the existing powers of the Attorney General, and we agree that more is needed. A Public Heathcare Advocate would represent the interests of the people of Pennsylvania in our life and death struggle with the healthcare industry. We’re tired of getting sick while they get rich!
We are building a mass movement to keep our hospitals open and put healthcare into the hands of workers and communities, instead of lining the pockets of Wall Street. Our 5 healthcare rights committees are active in more than 40 PA counties. Change comes from below, not above! Join Put People First! PA today.
Click here to sign up for Put People First! PA’s Enews or go here to see regional facebook pages and local contacts.
On Saturday, May 10th, the Southeast PA (SEPA) Healthcare Rights Committee members gathered bright and early for our monthly basebuilding event at a local leader Robin’s beloved food bank in Phoenixville, PA.
At the event, Put People First! PA members listened to people share their healthcare stories and talked about the dire effects of hospital closures – Crozer Health AND the ER & acute care closing at nearby Suburban Hospital Community Hospital. Members also offered blood pressure screenings and support with state benefit sign ups and Medicaid cut off appeals.
Robin reflected after the basebuilding, “We shouldn’t even have to have food banks. The safety net is not working! There’s profit in keeping us poor. There’s profit in keeping us sick. As much as I love the food bank, I wish I didn’t have to go. I wish I wasn’t food insecure. I wish my neighbors didn’t have to go. Through doing this work with Put People First! PA, I’m grateful I can see the bigger picture and open my mind more and more. We met amazing people.”
Another member, Legs, shared on their experience basebuilding for the first time. Legs said, “There was a line for the foodbank and then a second line for additional services. Our members talked with people in pairs to connect with people there. It was a really great opportunity even though it was so early!”
Raphie, another member who lives in Phoenixville, expressed, “Everyone seemed to believe health care was a human right, that the rich are hoarding wealth to spend on unnecessary things while the poor suffer, and that neither party was actually solving any of our real problems with healthcare. Even someone I talked to who was a Republican was on the same page. It’s heartening to know that a lot of people are on this track of thinking that will lead to change.”
On April 24th, 2025, Put People First! PA joined with the Philadelphia Unemployment Project for an action outside of the Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol to call attention to the Medicaid Cuts. Lower Bucks Hospital is in dire financial straits. The action named “Medicaid Cuts = Hospital Closures.” Southeast PA Healthcare Rights Committee leader, Anita spoke at the rally and joined with this messaging and pushed it further to declare, “Medicaid cuts = Death!” Watch the video below or linked here.
Hello, my name is Anita, and I’m the regional coordinator of Southeast PA with Put People First! PA. We are a state-wide, member-led, staff-free organization of poor and working people coming together to organize for our vision of healthcare as a human right since 2012. We are organizing the millions on or unfairly excluded from Medicaid, in urban and rural areas, across all the lines used to divide us: race, gender, party, and more. Our organization seeks to answer the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s call at the end of his life for a non-violent army of the poor and dispossessed of this nation.
Thanks to Ron for inviting us to this event here today. We recognize the devastation which is coming for us. Medicaid is vital to poor and working people, and any attack on Medicaid is an attack on our class. Medicaid Cuts equals Death! We need to recognize that the attacks to Medicaid today are the result of attacks yesterday. Under our former president, with a bipartisan mandate, starting in April 2023, 25 million people across the nation were cut from Medicaid in a historically unprecedented purge. 1 in 12 Pennsylvanians lost their healthcare, most lost it due to clerical error, and half of those who lost Medicaid were children. Put People First was there, helping people file their appeals to keep their Medicaid, gathering people’s stories to share and show we are not alone in our healthcare crises.
We know there will be worse coming as this war on the poor continues. Medicaid Cuts equals Death, and not just for those directly enrolled. These cuts will harm hospitals like this one behind me, potentially bankrupting and resulting in the closure of those deemed ‘unprofitable’. Put People First has been fighting hospital closures across the state, from the current closure of the Crozer system in Delco and hospitals in Scranton and Potter County, as well as the closures of Hahnemann in Philly and St Joes in Lancaster. These hospitals were vital to us, but not profitable to their owners. Hospital closures are a loss to the whole community, and will only get worse as Medicaid is attacked. What will your communities look like without a working hospital? This is why we say Medicaid Cuts = Death.
That ought to make you angry that our system is set up that we can lose our hospitals, our healthcare, our lives with little recourse. The Reverend Doctor King said “The dispossessed of this nation … live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. 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…” There are now 140 million people in this country living in poverty, 800 dying everyday of poverty. If you can recognize that Medicaid Cuts equals Death, you must recognize how serious this is. The time is at hand for us – the everyday Poor & Dispossessed – to build this new and unsettling force.
On May 30th, 2025, Put People First! PA members were published in The Nation talking about the effects of medicaid cuts and how the organization is fighting back. Click here for the article.
Politics / Rethinking Rural / May 30, 2025
Republicans’ “Big Beautiful” Medicaid Cuts Spur Rural Organizing Innovation Taking away healthcare coverage isn’t just “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” in Senator Josh Hawley’s apt phrase. It’s also putting pressure on rural members of Congress.
By Erica Etelson
When Tammy Rosing, a homeless behavioral health adviser in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was dropped from Medicaid last year due to a bureaucratic snafu, it meant going without medication for a painful autoimmune disease. Only with the help of a team of social workers, volunteer advocates, and a state legislator was Rosing able to get her Medicaid restored. Debt collectors are still after her for a $400 medical bill she incurred during that gap in coverage.
Rosing is part of Put People First! PA, a grassroots group that mobilizes struggling rural and urban Pennsylvanians to defend and strengthen Medicaid. If the GOP’s proposed Medicaid budget cuts go through, legions of folks will be turning to groups like Put People First! for support.
Congress is on the verge of legislating the biggest Medicaid cut in the program’s 60-year history. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the budget reconciliation bill cuts roughly $880 billion from Medicaid, a move that will result in 8.6 million of the poorest Americans losing their healthcare coverage. That’s on top of the 5 million already projected to lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade as a result of other policy changes.
Despite being “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” as Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) put it, most Republican members of Congress appear poised to support, in Trump’s words, the “big beautiful bill.” But a rift between Republican hard-liners and moderates has opened up around this issue, and organizers are pressuring a couple dozen members of Congress, many serving in largely rural districts and states, who might be willing to break ranks.
Rural Americans have higher maternal and infant mortality rates, higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and stroke, and higher overdose deaths. One in five rural American adults is enrolled in Medicaid, a program that pays for 90 percent of opioid and fentanyl addiction treatment, 62 percent of nursing home stays, half of all births, and one in five hospital visits.
Rural hospitals are in crisis, with many operating at a loss, especially those in the 10 states that have not opted in to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Since 2005, 193 rural hospitals have closed, and many more have eliminated unprofitable services such as hospice care and obstetrics, leaving women in labor to drive long distances to the nearest labor and delivery ward. In addition to stranding patients in medical deserts, hospital closures devastate local economies. In many rural areas, the local hospital is one of the largest employers, second only to public schools.
In the “Pennsylvania Wilds” region north of the Alleghenies, Put People First! PA has been organizing around Medicaid since 2014. It organizes uncovered Pennsylvanians using an innovative model that offers free, volunteer-staffed pop-up health clinics alongside assistance in applying for Medicaid or appealing a denial or termination of benefits. At these “people’s clinics” held at churches, housing projects, and food banks, Put People First! literally meets people where they’re at, building relationships and trust as an on-ramp toward political activation.
Put People First! invites clinic patients to participate in one of five Health Care Rights Committees across the state. There, they are able to connect with others coping with healthcare access crises and get plugged in to state and federal advocacy campaigns. Currently, the group is trying to pass a statewide bill that that would restore adult dental coverage cut from the state’s Medicaid program in 2011.
“A lot of rural people on Medicaid don’t have teeth because all they can get are cleanings or extractions, not root canals or other procedures,” says Harrison Farina, a volunteer coordinator for Put People First! Dental coverage can be life-changing and even lifesaving in the case of untreated abscesses.
Put People First! is also pushing for the creation of a Public Health Advocate that regulates hospitals and other healthcare and insurance companies for the public good. With the backing of the state’s attorney general, the public health advocate would be empowered to curb healthcare mergers and acquisitions that leave residents with a shortage of quality care. (In my 16,000-person town in California, a doctor wouldn’t refer my son for a much-needed MRI, citing the fact that there’s only one MRI machine and so its use must be rationed. In the nearby, extremely poor town of Covelo, average ambulance response time is one hour).
People First! empowers current and former Medicaid recipients to testify at legislative hearings and town halls, meet with legislators, and set the group’s priorities. Tammy Rosing got involved with the group in 2017, when Trump’s election led to her “political awakening.” It wasn’t long before Rosing concluded that “this isn’t just a Trump thing…neither party speaks to the needs of poor people. Change is going to come from below, not above, but only if we get organized.” Put People First! helped Rosing get her Medicaid restored, and Rosing is committed to using her experience to help others navigate the bureaucracy and to “make some real deep change.”
In addition to its statewide advocacy, Put People First! is also making sure that Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation hears from Medicaid recipients before casting their votes on the reconciliation bill. Its Nonviolent Medicaid Army is running a #MedicaidMonday social media campaign that invites people from across the country to share their stories of medical care, need, and neglect. Their message is clear and (one would hope) compelling: Taking away people’s healthcare is truly devastating.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear called proposed Medicaid cuts “an attack on rural America.” He’s right. It’s a betrayal of low-income people from Baltimore to Saginaw to the Central Valley of California. All to pay for extending tax cuts that further enrich the 1 percent—a 1 percent that can pay for private helicopter evacuation if a medical emergency finds them far from the nearest hospital.
Cutting Medicaid is about as “beautiful” as a burst appendix on the side of a county highway.
