The session will be a venue for people coming to the US Social Forum from across the country to share their direct and personal experiences of the healthcare crisis in the United States: lack of health insurance, insufficient health insurance, bankruptcy and/or impoverishment due to unaffordable health insurance, and the resultant injurious impacts on their health and the quality of life to them and their families.

HCN considers the healthcare crisis in the United States to be a form of class-based and race-based discrimination and oppression in violation of international humanitarian law.

The session will also be and organizing and mobilizing instrument that further spurs the existent national grassroots and mass based movement to win passage of a publicly funded single-payer healthcare system in the respective communities of session participants that is based on the principle that healthcare is a fundamental human right for all regardless of citizenship status or employment status. The session will also provide participants with take-home literature that comprehensively describes the healthcare crisis in the United States; that compares the US healthcare system with that of other industrialized and developing nations; that explains the single-payer solution; that fully exposes the role of the US-based health insurance and pharmaceutical industries’ ongoing imperative to profit off of the illness and death of residents of the US, and finally that explains the need to provide healthcare and not warfare.

The session will expose the “third world within” regarding the condition of healthcare access within the US and will seek to help to build bridges with international cob’s who are working to eradicate the global health crisis that neoliberalism both creates and exacerbates.

The session will be four hours in length. We expect 100 people. We expect four to six facilitators: one LBGT, three female; two white; three African-American, and one Latino. Two will be over 65 and one will be 25 years or younger. We expect a prominent current or past elected official to keynote. We will have a dedicated interactive question and answer period that promotes solution-centered strategies for the continuation of this historic work. A panel of expert/advocates (four) will respond to the range of the most complex issues and questions. This panel will have both race and gender balance. A meaningful percentage of those sharing their experience of the US healthcare crisis will be local people.

We wish to have this session on Saturday, June 30th. We will audio and video tape our session for worldwide distribution on our website and for submission to the US Congress. The session will require chairs for 50 people (this is what is expected at any one time) and three long tables. We will provide our podium and sound if the US Forum can not assist us with this technical matter.