The disease that is marketplace medicine has been festering in Massachusetts for decades. Its boils have reached the surface and are now about to burst, bringing down the urban hospital Carney in Dorchester and the rural hospital Nashoba Valley in Ayer. Can we deliver the life-saving remedy in time? Where do we go from here?
Peter Knowlton, President Emeritus of the United Electrical Workers Union, retired with over three decades of service to UE. Knowlton is known throughout the union and the broader movement for his willingness, even eagerness, to debate and discuss difficult issues. He relishes teaching union members and CEOs the value of single-payer universal health care. His vision has also been shaped by the social movements in which he has been engaged since his student days at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the 1970s. He now sits on the board of Mass-Care, serving on its Labor Committee. Knowlton is co-author of the white paper recently published by Mass-Care which offers a three-step solution to the crisis unfolding as Steward Health Care disintegrates (“The Steward Hospital Crisis: How Medicare for All and Eminent Domain Would Solve this Problem”).
Reverend Doctor Savina Martin is a lifelong activist and organizer from Massachusetts. An Army veteran, over the years she has mobilized and organized around the war on drugs affecting homeless men, women and veterans in Boston and San Diego. She served as the president of the Boston Union of the Homeless and played a leading role in Treatment On Demand in Massachusetts. During the mid-1980s, she helped lead direct action efforts during the Union’s Housing Takeover Campaign. She is a Poverty Scholar, with a doctoral degree in Developmental Psychology. Doctor Martin is currently the Eastern Chair of the Massachusetts Poor People Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. When asked what we are about, she responded, “That’s what I would say about building partnerships – that we all need to come together. All women and men, religions and orientations, who are suffering in this country need to come together and not allow the 1% of this world, of this nation, to dictate to us their agenda.”
Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH is a Distinguished Professor of public health at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she was previously a Professor of Medicine. A native of Louisiana, she graduated from LSU Medical School in New Orleans and completed an internal medicine residency at Cambridge Hospital and a research fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the Institute of Medicine, she worked with the late Senator Paul Wellstone and then-Congressman Bernie Sanders. Among her extensive scholarly contributions is included a recent study in the JAMA on private equity firms stripping assets from hospitals they acquire. Doctor Woolhandler is a leading advocate for health care justice and national health insurance for the United States. A founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, she co-chairs, with Dr. David Himmelstein, The Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in The US.
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