Bob McCarty Writes

Advocates of single-payer health care will not stop there, according to Jerry Tucker, former member of the UAW International Executive Board who now represents the group, Labor for Single Payer.  Speaking during the opening session of the 2009 Healthcare-Now.org National Strategy Conference Saturday afternoon in St. Louis, he explained his vision for the future.

“Health care is but one of the fronts that we have to be concerned about in the struggle for social justice,” said Tucker, the second of six panel members to speak during the session.

“When we whip this health care crisis and we bring it into the bright place where it should be and we take the corporate community and its greed out of the picture, it will be such a major setback for them that it will open the door for many of the other struggles as well.”

Tucker, who claimed to have cut his teeth as a single-payer advocate in 1972 as Big Labor’s representative to advance legislation sponsored by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), was very open to the audience he considered all-friendly, going so far as to admit that union workers once had “the Lambourghini” — not the Cadillac — of health care plans.

I’ve never had a Lambourghini or Cadillac plant.  Have you?

Below is the full-length video of Tucker’s statement I shot as the only journalist at the conference.

To see and hear what other conference speakers had to say, click here.

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