“Luxury Condos Can’t Do CPR” An Update from Health Care for the 99%
Dear Editor,
On Wall Street, where the season is ever spring, our darling buds in the finance industry don’t know what’s shakin’. Sure, there’s more spring in their steps than ever this April 15, as the Bloomberg crawls crow that investors are “killing it” to rapturous, premature reports of American job growth. This income tax season, though, we at Health Care for the 99% (HCF99%) propose a new tax for those who continue to promote the killer culture of wealth care: a Tobin tax on Wall Street financial transactions, or FTT.
An FTT could raise hundreds of billions of dollars for the federal government, more than enough to cover universal health care. This past winter, HCF99% partnered with community organizations in Manhattan and Brooklyn to challenge a rough wave of hospital closings that will deprive thousands of essential hospital beds across Brooklyn and along the West Side of Manhattan below 57th Street. With Save St. Vincent’s, a coalition of community members which has rallied to resuscitate the bedrock of the West Village, HCF99% called out real estate developer Bill Rudin and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn on Rudin’s plan to convert the hospital into luxury condominiums. Luxury condos can’t do CPR, of course, so we with the health care credentials are forced to show off our resuscitation abilities in Brooklyn, too. HCF99% has lent support to neighborhood efforts to keep Interfaith, Brookdale, Wyckoff, Kingsboro Psychiatric, Kingsbrook Jewish from succumbing to fatal closings and mergers along budget lines.
Yet hope springs eternal from Albany, where New York State Assemblyman Dick Gottfried (D-75th District) has once again sponsored a single-payer health care bill. With HCF99% on call here in the city, winter is over: Wealth care reform is becoming reality in New York City, where we now occupy the attention of the Wall Street sickos who occupy our human right to health care.
For more on the work of Health Care for the 99%, please follow us on Twitter @healthcarefor99 or check out our website owshealthcare.wordpress.com. Take a picture for the site. Tell us your story. On our health care plan your needs won’t be denied.
Maureen Miller
Maureen Miller is an MD-MPH student in New York. She is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program and Healthcare for the 99%.
