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.
- Actions, hospitals, Medicaid Cut Offs Organizing Drive, Nonviolent Medicaid Army, Southeast PA
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