Reflecting on our Winter Retreat

A Foot Deep in Snow and Marching into the Year Ahead

Winter Retreat 2016 group shot

Put People First! PA held our first ever Winter Teams and Organizing Committees retreat In beautiful Shade Gap (Huntingdon County) on the weekend of January 23rd, 2016. This was the jump off point for the new year. We couldn’t have asked for a better setting: surrounded by mountains, trees, and yes snow, lots of it. Our retreat was also the weekend of the biggest snowstorm of the winter so far, but that wouldn’t stop us! Seventeen adults representing each PPF Team, Organizing Committee and the Campaign Advisory Board, along with three young people, braved the storm to be together as a family. Additionally, members who couldn’t be there in person called in for different portions of the retreat.

PPF Winter Retreat 2016 - Meeting

We met in teams to set goals and timelines for the year, addressed strategic questions across our teams, deepened our commitment to grassroots fundraising, learned about how our economic system works and studied history together. It was a great space to build our strategies and friendships. Listening and being a part of the different discussions and trainings, I learned so much about myself as a leader, and I saw the brilliance of our members and partners first hand. One of the best quotes was from Danelle who came by train from Johnstown with her two daughters: “I didn’t say it was going to be easy, I said I would do it.” Which reflects how I feel about the conditions ahead of us.

My greatest takeaway from that weekend was that real power comes from collectivity. Seeing our strength in each other and wanting to put each other first was re-energizing. I know that the people in PPF and our partners will be a large part of changing what is politically possible. Not just in Pennsylvania, but in our whole society.

PPF Winter Retreat 2016

I want to thank everyone involved with the retreat! The planning team (Sheila, Nijmie, Nick and Anna) and everyone who attended, set up, cleaned up, prepared food, played with young people, taught, led, called in and participated. Also thank you to all of those folks who were unable to make it in person. We know you were with us in your thoughts and in spirit.

With love,
Roger for the PPF Media and Communications Team

Insurance Department asks for Feedback and PPF Responds

January 29th was the date of the last PA Insurance Department’s e-newsletter. The newsletter contained an article with the following headline: “Insurance Department Issues Guidelines for 2017 Health Insurance Rate Filings”. The guidelines can be found here.

What are these “guidelines” and what do they mean?

The newsletter goes on to say this:

“Commissioner Miller has made transparency a top priority for the department and believes transparency needs to work both ways. The department is striving to be more transparent with the industry about its priorities and processes, while at the same time trying to make more information about its insurance markets available to the public and understandable for consumers. To help achieve these goals, the department has posted on its website draft guidance that proposes requirements for information issuers must submit in their 2017 ACA-compliant individual and small group health insurance rate filings. The department’s goal with this guidance is to make sure the initial rate filings contain the information the department needs to evaluate fully the proposed rate changes and that the information is presented in a clear and consistent manner. The guidance will also outline and standardize what information contained in the rate filing the department intends to make public, when it will be made public, and how it will be presented to consumers.”

In other words, the “guidelines” lay out 1) what information insurance companies have to submit to the PA Insurance Department when they request premium increases for 2017 on the Affordable Care Act Marketplace 2) what information will be made public for healthcare consumers and how it will be made available.

At PPF, we believe that before any decisions are made to increase health insurance premiums on ACA plans, there should be public hearings for the Insurance Department to share information on the proposed increases and to hear from individuals and families about how these increases might impact them. Currently, the guidance does not include public hearings as part of the process.

In addition, the Insurance Department asked for feedback by February 5th, giving a comment window of only one week on a process that stands to impact hundreds of thousands of people across PA – this year 150,000 people were impacted by plans that saw premium increases across the Commonwealth.

Below is our response to the request for feedback. Please read it and join today if you’d like to help we ensure that PA Insurance Department is accountable and transparent to us and that public hearings are held before any additional rate increases are approved.

 

Here is PPF’s response to the request for feedback:

We shared the draft rate filing guidance with our membership and had the following comments:

Thank you for asking for public comment on the guidance, although the window of time was quite short, and the guidance is not presented in language that everyday people can understand, leading us to believe that it was not intended for healthcare consumers.

One of the biggest recommendations we have for changes to the guidance is thatpublic hearings are necessary to inform consumers about proposed rate hikes and hear how such hikes might impact them before decisions can responsibly be made by the Insurance Department. Otherwise what we have is a completely one-sided process which privileges major corporations over individuals and families throughout the Commonwealth.

Additionally we make the following recommendations:

1) Require written and publicly available decisions on rate cases.

2) Require a justification of overhead.

3) Include consumer representation.

4) Calculate rate hikes based on modes instead of averages.

5) Factor in fundamental trends of changing utilizations based on preventative and chronic care when using past experience.

6) Require cost containment/savings and improving preventative medicine.

We would like to set up a meeting with your office to discussion these recommendations further.

How We Love Each Other

by PPF Member Danelle Morrow

The philosophy of love goes back as far as time. Love is never-ending, and stronger than the flow of a river roaring down the mountain rushing toward the ocean.

There are many types of love, and though everybody perceives it differently, the philosophy remains the same.

The term eros (Greek erasthai) is used to refer to that part of love constituting a passionate, intense desire for something; often thought to be referred to as a sexual desire, bringing the common day term “erotic.”

On the other hand, the Greek word philia expresses a fondness and appreciation for one another, either because the friendship is useful, or because the character and values of another are pleasing. Objectively it can be seen as those who share our dispositions, who hold no grudges, who are likeminded, who are temperate and just, or who admire us as we admire them.

Still though, my personal favorite philosophical view is called Agape, it refers to the paternal love of God for man and of man for God, but is extended to include a brotherly love for all humanity. Agape draws from elements from both eros and philia in that it seeks a perfect kind of love that is at once a fondness and a passion without the necessity of reciprocity. The concept is expanded on in the Judaic-Christian tradition of loving God: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) and loving “thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). The love of God requires absolute devotion that is reminiscent of Plato’s love of Beauty, which involves an erotic passion, awe, and desire that transcends earthly cares and obstacles.

You may ask yourself, How does this tie into Put People First? I will gladly explain. Right now we are focused on universal healthcare, but once that is accomplished, we will be moving on to bigger and better things. We fight back against oppression and poverty through grassroots organizing, and those grassroots we created began with love for one another, without regard for color, religion, social status, or disability.

In Put People First, I have come to know some amazing people, and we are invested in each other’s well-being. Members and field organizers of Put People First have the ability to love, not just those who they know or who are familiar, but to love all people as human beings. I am proud to be apart of this organization and proud to watch the growth take place as we begin to build our way to a new revolution for the people, by the people.

Organizing Our Whole Selves: Reflections on the 2015 Single Payer Strategy Conference

reposted from the Healthcare is a Human Right Collaborative website

by Jonathan Kissam (VT Workers’ Center) and Karim Sariahmed (Put People First! PA)

November 30, 2015

At the end of October, we traveled with four other people from the Healthcare Is a Human Right Collaborative to Chicago for the Single Payer Strategy Conference. The conference, hosted jointly by Healthcare NOW!, Labor Campaign for Single Payer and One Payer States, was an exciting gathering of organizers from all over the country, working to build a movement for universal, publicly financed healthcare.

Every year, America’s profit-driven healthcare system prevents millions of people from getting the care that they need, while generating fabulous profits for a small class of stockholders. Transforming our healthcare system into one that recognizes and meets the human right to health for all people will require a mass social movement, HCHR workshopone that can overcome opposition from the powerful private health insurance companies, other corporations and institutions which profit and benefit from the existing system, and their ideological allies in both major political parties who are committed to small government and the supremacy of the “free market.”

How can we build this movement? This year’s Single Payer Strategy Conference was structured around five framing questions that challenged everyone to think strategically about what it means to build a movement, how we build with other movements, how we organize around the Affordable Care Act and move beyond it, how we move toward victory in our states and nationally, and how we can concretely confront inequities along lines of race, class, gender, and immigration status. These are all critical questions, and questions we take deeply to heart in our Healthcare Is a Human Right campaigns.

To build a broad-based movement and connect strategically with other movements, we need to project a big-picture moral vision, we need to build relationships, and we need to organize whole people.

A moral vision, rooted in deeply held human values, can capture the imagination of millions of people, become a new “common sense,” and thereby change what is politically possible. Many people at the conference made a connection between the civil rights movement and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. Though the civil rights movement did not specifically demand Medicare and Medicaid, it established a moral authority that shifted the entire political landscape, opening up new political possibilities. Within this space, people rose up in motion around all kinds of issues, organizing against the war, for women’s rights, for environmental protection, for LGBTQ liberation, for the rights of people with disabilities, and for the rights of indigenous peoples. That is what we need to recreate.

We also need to build relationships across movements. We need to use our moral vision to connect our fight for health care with fights for Black lives, a living wage, immigration reform, trans liberation, and public school funding, but we can’t simply provide transactional support for one another’s campaigns. We have to build trust and develop real relationships with each other across movements, and we also have to be really intentional about making sure that our campaigns and organizations are truly diverse and inclusive and elevate the leadership of people of color, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, poor and working class folks, people with disabilities, and people of all ages. We do this through our base building, our leadership development, our political education, and all other areas of our campaigns. The hard work of engaging in this way is not a distraction: it is central to the work of movements, and is the only way to win a health care system that serves all people equitably and protects the most vulnerable.

When we organize, we also need to organize whole people, allowing and encouraging one another to bring our whole selves into the movement. Only by creating space for us to transform ourselves can our movements stimulate the broader transformation of institutions and social relations that is needed to win universal, publicly financed healthcare. Successful movements tap into our shared humanity and guide us together in common cause. The work that helps us be together is both the means and the end. When we are meaningfully united across difference, we win.

Our workshop on the Healthcare Is a Human Right model at the conference modeled our commitment to a moral vision, building relationships that challenge and nurture us, supporting each other’s leadership, and organizing whole people. We collaboratively planned and facilitated the workshop, brought our whole selves into the room through stories and poetry, and enabled everyone in the room to actively engage and contribute through storytelling in pairs and through small group discussions.

We win, as the conference organizers say, when we build a movement. By bringing people together to build relationships and dig into critical strategy questions, the Single Payer Strategy Conference serves a hugely important role in this process. Let’s keep building a moral case for transforming the healthcare system, keep building relationships with each other and with people in other movements, keep elevating the leadership of people who are most impacted by injustices, and keep bringing our whole selves into this fight.

Jonathan Kissam is a member of the Vermont Workers’ Center and Karim Sariahmed is a member of Put People First! Pennsylvania. They tweet at @domesticleft and @sariahmed.

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