Why Nurses Are Going Door-to-Door for Medicare for All

National Nurses United, the country's largest nurses union, has been one of the most vocal advocates for moving to a single-payer health-care system, which would eliminate privately-owned, for-profit health insurance companies. Representing more than 150,000 members across 22 states, the union has been leading an organizing drive, helping volunteers across the country knock on doors and build support for a shift away from for-profit health care. "This is probably the most exciting campaign I've ever worked on," says Jasmine Ruddy, the lead organizer for the union's campaign.

Since Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced her Medicare for All bill at the end of February, 113 members of Congress have added their names as co-sponsors. Though it may be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, the bill is a sign of how public support for a single-payer health-care system has shifted in the past few years. In 2018, the Pew Research Center found that after after falling below 50 percent during the Obama administration, 60 percent of Americans now agree with the statement: "it's the government's responsibility to ensure health care coverage."

As it is now, the U.S. health-care system incurs more costs and gets worse results than that of other industrialized nations. The price of insulin has been skyrocketing in recent years, pharmaceutical companies are ignoring public health crises that don't have a big enough return on investment, and one out of every three GoFundMe donations now goes to people fundraising for medical costs. Ruddy talked to us about why nurses are jumping into an increasingly urgent fight about national healthcare.

GQ: Why in National Nurses United organizing for Medicare for All now?

Jasmine Ruddy: Our union has actually been fighting on Medicare for All for four decades, since before it was popular. And it just feels exciting that we're in a place where what's politically possible is shifting. We could win and we could radically transform the healthcare system in United States, which would return a fifth of the world's largest economy back to the hands of the people and out of the hands of private insurance. It would be one of the largest social gains for regular everyday Americans, probably since the New Deal.

Can you talk a little about why nurses are so invested in campaigning for Medicare for All?

I think it makes total sense that nurses would be so driven to support guaranteeing healthcare as a human right. They're the ones in the rooms with patients, choosing between their rent or their groceries and their healthcare. And that feels really personal to the nurses in our membership, and nurses everywhere, you know, who signed up to do this job to take care of people. And now all of a sudden cost is getting in the way of them being able to just do their job.

How would you describe the campaign strategy then? What's the strategy beyond winning over members of Congress?

This bill is taking off in Congress in a way that it never has before, and it's politically viable. But it's going to take a combination of the lobbying that we can do of Congress members on the hill, and a mass grassroots movement that we can build in communities across the country. Because we recognize in studying other social movements that no social gains are won without some sort of mass movement of working people calling for that demand.

How would you describe that to somebody who is not familiar with what grassroots organizing looks like?

That's a good question because we're trying do mass grassroots work. And what that looks like is basically making it as easy as possible for any person, anywhere in the country, to get engaged and involved and take on a really big role. We make that intentionally very easy to do: we make our strategy, training resources, and support really open source so that anyone, not just people who consider themselves already to be like single payer activists, but any person who is just fed up with how high their premiums are and wants to be part of the process can help change it. We've gotten a lot of volunteers telling us they were just waiting to be asked what to do. And we're giving them a job, and we're telling them what the strategy is, and we're asking them to work with us, and they're doing it. Volunteers for the campaign have held over 1,500 canvases just the spring, since congresswoman Jayapal introduced her bill. And these volunteers have knocked on 20,000 doors and they've collected about 14,000 signatures.

One criticism I've heard around building professional support for Medicare for All is that a single-payer system would likely cut into the paychecks for doctors and nurses. Is that a concern for the nurses union?

No, it’s not. Frankly, what’s threatening the pay of nurses in our union is the way that the current system is set up. As we're seeing the consolidation and privatization of hospital systems, they're cutting costs, they're cutting shifts, they're threatening the pay of nurses. And it's in that really unstable for-profit system that nurses' paychecks are under threat. CEOs of the major healthcare insurance companies last year made billions of dollars in profit. That money could have gone to giving patients care, it could have gone to nurses' salaries, it could have gone to doctor salaries, but it didn't. The root of the problem is the private insurance industry. And Medicare for All it the only solution that gets rid of that.

You mentioned earlier that Medicare for All would put a fifth of the economy in "the hands of the people." Can you explain that?

Anytime that we create universal programs that are funded by the government, there's a process that that gets built into that. We can elect the people who have who make decisions about the funding of of our health care. We can't make those decisions now—we don't elect the CEOs of Kaiser, right, or of Etna. I think that it sometimes can get confusing for folks, but what we're talking about is adding a layer of democracy and accountability to the way that we fund our healthcare, not the way we provide our healthcare. We're not talking about getting rid of doctors or providers, all that we're talking about is getting rid of the insurance companies and changing the way that we pay for the services.

So what's the next step for NNU's Medicare for All campaigning?

When we when eventually pass Medicare for All, it will be with Republican support. And I think that the way we do that is by doing a lot of what we're already doing, which is organizing not only in blue states across the country, but also in red districts. Some of our most active volunteers are in deeply red states like Alabama, Tennessee, Arizona and Texas, because what we know is that our broken healthcare system does not discriminate by political party preference. These are people who might not have considered themselves to be progressive activists, but they believe the healthcare system is broken and they want to be part of changing that. There are working class Americans across the country who can't afford their health care. And I think organizing in those communities is increasingly a part of part of the solution for sure.

Originally Appeared on GQ