No matter our age, race, or zip code, everyone deserves access to affordable medicine. Life and health should not be for sale.
As the entire world waits for an effective COVID-19 vaccine, we recognize that access and distribution of the medicine will be one of the country’s biggest ethical challenges. Pharmaceutical corporations, as we know, have no issue price-gouging life saving medicine developed with public funding.
It didn’t have to be this way, and we are showing another way. In the face of so much hate and incompetence we, the people are leading. And some of our elected officials – our people – are leading too.
“The largest corporations stand to access hundreds of billions of dollars with little public oversight,” TakeAction Minnesota, a progressive advocacy and organizing group, said in a news release Thursday. “Meanwhile, the safety net for many classifications of workers and undocumented working families is nonexistent.”
Yesterday we put out a statement on the federal stimulus package. Today, the $2.2 trillion passed the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s better than nothing, but is not good, providing the largest, no-strings-attached corporate bailout in our nation’s history. Watch this clip from Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez.
As the economy teeters, elected officials are racing to make changes to the nation’s Unemployment Insurance system. But in a country that ties health insurance to employment, we need to ask: what about health care?
There’s no question about it. Everyone needs health care, period. Especially in a pandemic.
When it comes to politics and policy, the question isn’t whether government is big or small, but who is our government working for.
We believe in good government that’s by and for the people.
Today, we’re thanking Sen. Tina Smith and Sen. Amy Klobuchar for standing with people and small businesses and voting NO on Senator Mitch McConnell’s corporate slush fund bill.
