Conversation with
Greg Gigg
Just Health Care
Headed for the
Ballot in a Third
Community
• See also: Just
Health Care Airs Nationally
Greg Gigg, a Teamster trucker, is helping to lead
a campaign to put Just Health Care on the ballot in the upcoming
municipal election in his hometown of Somerville, Mass. Together
with other LP activists in Somerville, he’s been out on the
street and going door-to-door, clipboard in hand, seeking the
requisite 2,400 valid signatures needed to put a nonbinding
resolution before voters in November.
"We’ve found that an especially good place
to catch people is just outside the pharmacy," he says.
"The people coming out of there have just confronted the high
cost of health care and drugs. They’re very eager to talk about
the health care issue. We’ve heard a lot of horror stories. We
talked to a couple who are both on medication. The fellow has high
blood pressure, and he’s cut his pills in half so they could
afford to pay for her medicine. It’s just terrible." Most
people, he adds, sign the petition, and many of them do it
eagerly.
Gigg, who moved to the U.S. from Canada ten years
ago, knows how much better the U.S. health care system could be.
"There’s nothing better than personal experience when you’re
talking to people about an alternative," he says. In fact, he
just returned from a trip to Canada, where he visited several
family members under medical care: a niece with a premature baby,
another family member with leukemia, and a third who gets regular
kidney dialysis. "And none of these people has seen a
bill!" he exclaims. (Canada’s health care system, like the
Just Health Care system the Labor Party is proposing, guarantees
everyone needed care free of cost. The system is financed and
administered by the government, the "single payer" of
health care bills.)
Gigg thinks chances are good that the Somerville
LP activists will succeed in getting Just Health Care on the
ballot. Back in May, they held a successful community forum on
Just Health Care featuring Steffie Woolhandler from Physicians for
a National Health Program and other experts. Some of the 35 LP
members in Somerville have come to the party through the Just
Health Care campaign.
"There’s actually a lot of awareness about
health care issues here," he notes. "There are many
teaching hospitals in the Boston area, and some HMOs got their
start here." Somerville’s newly elected mayor, a nurse,
supports national health insurance. Somerville’s state
representative is backing a bill now in the state legislature
calling for a statewide single payer system.
Gigg notes that there’s some debate about
whether a local referendum is really what’s needed to address a
national problem. Even proposals for state-wide single payer
systems are limited. But the important thing, he maintains, is to
"talk to people right in your own community. You have to
build support from the bottom up."
If the Just Health Care initiative does get on the
ballot and is passed, it will be the third successful nonbinding
referendum for the Labor Party’s Just Health Care campaign in
the state. Last year, voters in West
Roxbury and Quincy approved such resolutions by a 71 percent
margin. |
