Rising Up For Justice: A Doctor-Led Movement for Medicare-for-All

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FEATURING DR. PHILIP VERHOEF - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, Dr. Phil Verhoef joins us. He is an adult and pediatric ICU physician and Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He is also the immediate past president (and a national board member) of Physicians for a National Health Program; past president of the Illinois Single Payer Coalition; past president of the PNHP-IL chapter; and was faculty advisor for the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine Students for a National Health Program chapter since its inception, before moving to Hawaii in 2019. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So it's all in the name—Physicians for National Health Program—but it seems that what sets PNHP apart is that it is the only physician-led national organization that is focused specifically on achieving single payer healthcare, achieving a tax-funded universal healthcare system where everybody is covered. Is that accurate? 

Dr. Philip Verhoef: That's exactly right. We've been in this fight now for almost 40 years, and we were started by physicians and over the years we have continued to grow. We now number over 25,000 physician-supporters who believe that a single payer national health insurance system is really the solution for assuring universal healthcare coverage for all people in the United States. 

Kolhatkar: So, an entire organization of thousands of people focused on achieving one simple thing that has a huge demand and a huge need sounds pretty straightforward. How do you summarize what you have to do to achieve this, 

Verhoef: There's so much that we have to do. And, and if you, you know, if you were to ask the people that founded PNHP almost 40 years ago, if they thought that this organization was still gonna be around 40 years later, they would've laughed at you. I've asked them that question and they've said, “we figured that we'd be able to get this within a few years, and there would be no problem. And then we would suddenly see that everybody in this country would have equitable access to healthcare,” because, right now we have a healthcare system in the United States that leaves almost 30 million people without any health insurance at all. And that means they avoid seeking care. They can't afford to pay for it when they need it. And it means that, that we are literally hurting them in that context. 

And that's a real stark contrast to any other developed country in the world where they all guarantee healthcare for the people that live there. And so we're really an outlier as a developed country.