Joe Auciello’s “Reading from Left to Right” column this month leads off with discussion, based on Boston Globe reports, of how dangerous hospitals are for patients — more than 100,000 were killed by hospitals last year. The “managed health care revolution,” and the system that offers health care only in exchange for profit, is the underlying cause of this disaster.

Is there an alternative? Yes. On June 6 the Labor Party is launching its national campaign for “Just Health Care.” This is a call for a national health insurance program that will provide lifetime coverage for every resident of the United States. The Just Health Care program calls for a publicly administered and funded, non-profit system with freedom to choose one’s own doctors and health professionals.

The nationwide campaign will be launched by Just Health Care Radio, a two-hour panel discussion and call-in show to be broadcast June 6, 1999, from noon to 2 pm Eastern time. The show will originate from Pacifica Radio’s WBAI (99.5 FM) in New York City. It will be available via satellite to all Pacifica stations around the country as well as to National Public Radio (NPR) stations. Labor Party members and supporters of the Just Health Care campaign are contacting Pacifica and NPR stations in their areas, urging them to broadcast the show.

The radio show will also be available at the Labor Party’s new web address: www.thelaborparty.org. To listen you will need RealPlayer software installed on your computer. (You can download this software free of charge from www.real.com.)

Kit Costello, president of the California Nurses Association, will moderate the panel discussion, which will take up the first hour of the show. Panel participants include: Steffie Woolhandler, MD, and David Himmelstein, MD, of Physicians for a National Health Care Program; Sidney Wolfe, MD, director of Ralph Nader’s Health Research Group; Kathleen Connors, president of the National Federation of Nurses Unions of Canada; Claudia Fagan, author of Universal Health Care: What the United States Can Learn from the Canadian Experience; Quentin Young, MD, former president of the American Public Health Association; and Tony Mazzocchi, of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Union (PACE), who is Labor Party national organizer.

Unions representing three million workers, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the thousands of unions and community groups that make up the Labor Party, are backing this campaign, along with such organizations as Public Citizen and Physicians for a National Health Program.

The Labor Party’s newspaper, Labor Party Press, has carried valuable material on the health care issue. The back page of the June issue features the Just Health Care campaign, and November 1998 was a special issue on health care — with an especially useful article by Kathleen Connors comparing the U.S. and Canadian systems. The Labor Party website refers readers to additional, earlier issues of Labor Party Press covering this subject.