Sacramento Lobby Day 2009

Lobby Day 2009 — “We’re the future of health care, and we’re for single-payer”

By Jennifer Alloo, MS2, UC Irvine; co-coordinator, Lobby Day 2009; CaPA Student Board member and Parker Duncan, MPH, MS4, UC Irvine; CaPA medical student fellow

Over 450 health professional students from 17 academic institutions across California flooded the Capitol on Monday, 12 January, 2009, to tell legislators, “We’re the future of health care — and we’re for single payer.”

Following a March and Rally on the steps of the Capitol (see our first-ever correct news coverage: http://cbs13.com/video/?id=45462@kovr.dayport.com), students held legislative visits with almost every one of the 120 Legislators, securing at least 14 co-authorships. While most are renewal co-authorships, a few are from first-time Legislators, making the impact of LD09 even more significant.

To help prepare participants for their meetings with their legislators, UC Davis School of Medicine hosted the 2nd annual Training Day on Sunday, January 11th.

Training focused on not only the specifics of SB840 (led by Sara Rogers, Health Policy Consultant to Senator Mark Leno), but also an emphasis on preparing for the legislative visits. Parker Duncan, CaPA Fellow, taught a skill called “Message-in-a-Box” as well as the concept of “framing.” Instrumental to the day was the two breakout sessions, where students worked with their pre-assigned legislative visit team, in order to prepare themselves for Monday’s legislative visits. All students who conducted legislative visits were required to attend Sunday training, resulting in a significant increase in our effective messaging during legislative visits.

Sunday closed with inspirational remarks by Sheila Kuehl, who challenged all 450 students present to use LD09 as merely the first step towards catalyzing single-payer health care reform.

Monday began with a March down Capitol Mall, from the Embassy Suites where students stayed the night before, to the West steps of the Capitol, location of the noon Rally.

Thanks to the material support and generosity of the California School Employees Association (CSEA), each student carried a professionally printed poster, which helped create the impressive image of a sea of white coats visibly supporting SB 840 and HR 676. (MS2 Gaspar Rivera, UC Irvine, designed the entire image theme, from poster to button to business card, for LD09.)

Senator Mark Leno kicked off the Rally with a tribute to Sheila Kuehl and a rousing speech, clearly establishing both how committed he is to the movement and how fundamentally he understands it. Other speakers included CaPA Board Member Richard Quint; Deborah Berger, CNA Board Member; Brian Hurley, AMSA National President; Tanya Brown, RN, UCSF; Dan Stein, MS2, UC Davis; Nancy Anaya-Navarro, MS1, UC Irvine; and Marc Montecillo, MS2, UCLA Drew.

The Rally crowd included about 10 CaPA members, a number of CSEA members, as well as about 50 Healthcare Organizing Project members from San Francisco, who had just completed their morning

Lobby Day 2009 was both an educational and political success. Since 2008 the number of Lobby Day participants has doubled. Lobby Day organizers will continue to reach out to this year’s participants as we work together to strengthen the movement for single payer universal health care in California and nationally in 2009.

Finally, we also conducted a Survey of LD09, pre-test/post-test design focusing on the effect of LD09 on desire to participate in healthcare reform; we look forward to sharing results with you as soon as we compile and analyze the data.

Thank you to all CaPA members who supported LD09.