Interviews with Truthout.org: on Health Care

Medical doctor & advocate for community health provider

A: I have always been involved in issue-based politics, not party politics--I was never really originally drawn to party politics. I'm trained as a medical doctor--that's my field: I've been practicing long enough to see how extremely broken our health care system is. I had become very active in the world of health care advocacy, advocating for single payer, but also in the world of environmental politics, and advocating for being a community provider of health. That's really the way to do it. If you really want people to remain healthy, you can't just throw pills at people once they become sick, which I feel like I was doing as a medical doctor, so I began working on more upstream thinking.I began thinking, "If only our elected officials knew that there were all of these cost-saving solutions ..." After five years I knew if you really want to fix any political problems, you also have to fix the political system.

ObamaCare was step backward for goal of single payer

A: Well, we have it in Massachusetts, since it's really modeled after RomneyCare, and it's very problematic. It is not a solution--it did extend care to some people who didn't have it, but kind of at the cost of working families. The costs are not fairly distributed; the mandate is extremely unfair; the system is entirely unsustainable, and it is not working. Many people say health care is worse than it is better under ObamaCare, which is remarkable because you don't know what the real problems of a health care system are until you get sick.

Q: Was ObamaCare a step forward?

A: I think it was a step backward for the final goal of a system of single payer health care.

Q: So do you support ObamaCare?

A: I don't support ObamaCare and see it as a step backward that entrenches the power of the private health care industry.

What injures the climate's health also injures human health

It was also documented by Cuba when their oil pipeline went down. Without changing their health-care system, when they zeroed out their fossil fuel emissions, Cuba got healthy. It was not only reduction of emissions; it was also that they transitioned to a sustainable and healthy food system, and a sustainable and healthy transportation system, and those are essentially the underpinnings of modern disease--between pollution and a poisonous, predatory food system and passive transportation.