On June 25, the Health Care Can’t Wait Rally sponsored by Health Care for America Now! (HCAN) in Washington D.C. drew 10,000 union, community and health advocates, medical professionals and high profile members of Congress. Everyone carried the same message: this country needs affordable, high-quality healthcare for all, and we can’t or won’t wait any longer.


TWU’s Department of Political and Legislative Affairs (DPLA) was well prepared for the eventful day. Legislative assistants Maureen Abboud and Jonathan Levin greeted buses of Local 100 and Local 568 members in the morning and provided them with DLPA packets that included detailed information on health care issues and the legislators that TWU members would be lobbying. 


Participants rallied outside of the Capitol for about two hours and heard from speakers including: Edie Falco, HCAN National Director Richard Kirsch, CWA President Larry Cohen, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, SEIU Secretary Treasurer Anna Burger, Senators Chuck Schumer, Kirstin Gillibrand and Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel, among other labor leaders and legislators. 


Rangel told the enthusiastic crowd, “We have to have a health care system that works for everyone, not just the politically connected, not just the moneyed. Congress must expand health care to the 45 million individuals who still lack coverage. We must do the same for our nation’s children and working population.”


TWU members participated in the rally to voice their concerns over the current broken health care system and that special interests are attempting to hijack the process of health care reform. They were also there to let their lawmakers know that the labor movement will not stand for the taxation of health benefits.
 Service Employees Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, whose union is one of the nation’s largest for health care workers, said her members see the impact of lack of health care coverage in the nation’s emergency rooms daily.


“People are more worried about their medical bills than about the illnesses they have to treat,” Burger added. The insurers “have bean-counters and paper-pushers telling people what they can’t get,” she said. “We know our health care system is broken,” added SEIU Vice President Diane Palmer, RN, head of its Nurse Alliance.
 In their lobbying after the rally, TWU members and other unionists warned lawmakers that if workers must pay taxes on their present health benefits, they and the labor movement will turn against the health care legislation. 


“Our country needs major health care reform in Washington,” says TWU International President James C. Little. “We will not support any bill that proposes to tax health care benefits and we cannot allow special interests to stall and manipulate this process.”