Hi there,
Before we close the books on 2021, we wanted to look back and reflect on our incredible work together this year.
We were very busy so this email is long, but we couldn’t be prouder. While Covid impacted our ability to organize in person, we found new ways to organize and show our collective power. Thank you as always for making all this possible.
Together, here’s just some of what we accomplished in 2021:
When a new session of Congress begins, every bill from previous sessions must be reintroduced. We knew that the reintroduction of Medicare for All would be a big moment to not only secure new cosponsors but also ensure that all previous cosponsors signed on again.
So beginning in January, we started preparing for the reintroduction by meeting virtually with dozens of members of Congress asking them to be an original cosponsor. We also held our first National Strategy Call of the year with speakers Rep. Debbie Dingle and Ady Barkan.
On March 17, the Medicare for All Act of 2021 (H.R. 1976) was introduced with 112 original cosponsors! Shortly after, we unveiled our national strategy for the rest of the year – highlighting a total of 40 key congressional districts to focus our efforts on.
Through our local pressure campaigns, we celebrated a series of new cosponsors that brought us to a total of 117.
In August, we held one of our largest National Strategy Calls to date with well over 1,000 attendees. We were joined by Senator Bernie Sanders and NNU President Deborah Burger, RN, where we unveiled our plan to run pressure campaigns in four key House districts via texting, calling, postcarding, and a national Day of Action. All of the representatives in these districts had signed on to previous Medicare for All legislation but had yet to cosponsor H.R. 1976.
On November 6, we held our national Day of Action in these four House districts with massive car caravans, mobile billboard trucks, ads in local newspapers, and projection actions.
In December, we were successful in getting one of our priority representatives, John Garamendi (CA-03), to agree to cosponsor the bill, bringing our total to 118 – more than we had in the last session of Congress!
In March, hundreds of people applied to join the first ever Medicare for All Leadership School. The goal of the school was to enhance the skill sets and knowledge of social movement history of Medicare for All activists, whether they were new to the movement or had been organizing for a long time.
The school covered the background of the fight to win Medicare for All and the theories of social change that inform it, advanced organizing skills, and how those skills could be implemented into real world organizing. On June 8, 37 activists graduated from the first cohort and immediately got to work organizing in their communities.
In September, we began our second session of the Leadership School with 33 students graduating from the program in November.
In April, The Intercept broke news that CVS quietly gave a $5 million donation to the biggest anti-Medicare for All dark money group, the Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future – the largest donation to the Partnership ever.1
We mobilized into action starting on May 13 – the day of CVS Health’s annual shareholders meeting. During the meeting, we drove 365 phone calls into top executives demanding that they stop bankrolling anti-Medicare for All efforts.
In September, we held a public education panel, CVS Health, The Future of Health Care, and the Fight for Medicare for All, and over 2,000 people signed up to attend.
All of this culminated in our National CVS Day of Action, where we posted CVS style receipts on the doors of hundreds of stores across the country demanding that they stop funding anti-Medicare for All efforts.
Due to popular demand, we kept our CVS solo-actions going through October and by the end of the month, we reached 400 actions in 27 states in total including at the CVS Health corporate headquarters in Rhode Island!
Earlier this year, California had the opportunity to establish CalCare, a guaranteed, single-payer health care system for all California residents. While lawmakers chose to delay action on the bill until January 2022 — we got to work right away preparing for our next window of opportunity to pass AB 1400.
In July, we held a CalCare Statewide Strategy Call where we launched our plan for the fall to focus on organizing in 33 priority Assembly Districts.
In August, we kicked off our CalCare texting program where we eventually texted over 3 million California voters about CalCare across 33 districts. We also texted 300,000 Spanish speaking voters in California with the help of our Spanish language texting team.
Then in September, we launched our statewide phone banks to call the 60,000 new supporters we identified from our texting program. Hundreds of volunteers took part in statewide phone banks and postcard writing parties for CalCare. In total, we ended the year with over 24,000 calls made and 12,000 postcards sent to voters in key districts!
In September, we also hosted “CalCare Fest” with hundreds of attendees around the state where we held workshops on how to spread the word about CalCare, launched a petition signature competition, and hosted a massive text bank.
This month, we hosted our final CalCare Statewide Strategy Call of the year to gear up for the return of AB 1400 in January, where we announced our January 8 Day of Action.
This year has been a WILD ride. But, despite everything, we were able to accomplish so much in 2021 thanks to people like you stepping up and taking action with us.
Looking ahead we still have so much more to do. Covid has put into focus the purpose and stakes of our work – to protect nurses, patients, and communities and fight harder than ever before for Medicare for All. In 2022, we’ll need to escalate our pressure on Congress and the corporate interests that bankroll them in order to win.
Thank you for all your support and efforts, and we can’t wait to keep growing this movement with you.
Happy New Year,
Nurses’ Campaign to Win Medicare for All
1 - The Intercept
 |
 |
 |
Email us: [email protected]
This email was sent to [email protected]. You can update your information here.
Email is the most important way we stay in touch with you. To receive fewer emails, click here. If you want to unsubscribe from our mailing list, you can remove yourself here.