Photos: People’s World\YouTube Screenshots
WASHINGTON—Brandishing signs and voicing demands, more than 1,000 people paraded onto Capitol Hill on March 12, demanding the Senate, and specifically its Democrats, save Medicare and Medicaid from the ax of Congress’s ruling Republicans, GOP President Donald Trump and his puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk.
“Health care is a human right! Fight, fight, fight!” was a common chant. The crowd was festooned with signs promoting government-run single-payer Medicare For All, a longtime goal of National Nurses United. NNU sent a large contingent of marchers. It has crusaded for that cause, and led other unions to back it, for more than a decade. “Some cuts don’t heal,” NNU signs read.
“Working people depend on Medicare and Medicaid,” the AFL-CIO tweeted. “Threatening to make cuts to these essential programs would jeopardize the ability of millions of people to get the health care they need. Today, we stood up and let Congress know we won’t let this attack go unanswered.”
George Kerr of the Union of American Physicians and Residents, said his AFSCME sector “represents 140 providers at Unity Health Clinics throughout the D.C. area and 860 medical and dental residents at SUNY Buffalo.” Money to pay those groups, but especially the residents on the Buffalo campus, “is contingent on Medicare and Medicaid” payments to those institutions.
The GOP, Musk and Trump want to obliterate Medicaid—by cutting $880 billion over a decade–and slash Medicare spending, too. That prompted chants of “No health care, no peace!” and a handmade sign that read: “Protect MediCARE, not MediSCARE and MedicAID, not MedicRAID.”
“Cuts would be a disaster in this city and catastrophic in Buffalo,” Kerr elaborated. And all the money cut from the two “goes to the rich” under the GOP’s planned $4.5 trillion eight-to-nine-year tax cut.
That too was a common theme and chant during the march, including an obscene version: “Tax the rich! Tax the mother-f—ing rich!” the crowd declared. “Eliminate oligarchs!” another sign added.
Some marchers got personal against Musk and Trump. One gray-haired retired school counselor dressed herself in prison stripes and wore a front-and-back sign that had Trump’s name and his prisoner number from the Fulton County, Ga., jail in front and read “Lock him up!” on the back….READ MORE
