Last month, after a long canvassing campaign, the Boulder Democratic Socialists of America held a Medicaid Sign-up Event at a local library. As a steady stream of applicants arrived, a dedicated staff of volunteers were on hand to assist anyone who might have been eligible for state Medicaid benefits with the online application, and to walk them through the process step-by-step.
The response from the community was overwhelmingly positive, and now we are pushing the boundaries of our campaign farther into the neighboring town of Longmont, where we will be holding another sign-up on July 21st. Longmont, a huge part of Boulder County, has been heavily affected by the exponential wealth growth in the area over recent years, where life has become increasingly difficult for the working class.
One of our strategies in working to implement a universal health system in the United States is to try to expand current social health programs. And while there may be ample funding allocated for these programs in Boulder County, the State of Colorado’s Medicaid system is entirely web-based, and the application process is a daunting, bureaucratic task. We stand by the belief that no one should be prevented from taking advantage of these programs by barriers of language, internet access, or computer literacy.
Boulder and the surrounding area is quickly becoming the next technocratic mecca of the United States, with Google having built a massive, block-sized campus in the middle of our city just last year. The streets are filling with Teslas, the forefront of Amazon’s mega-conglomerate effort sits on one of our main thoroughfares with the Whole Foods flagship store, police are handing out tickets to homeless people for charging their phones in public spaces, and the laborers who actually work in this city are imported from the farther reaches to where they have been pushed by a skyrocketing cost of living, only to be sent back beyond the city limits at the end of the work day.
The story of Boulder is not new, nor is it unique. Capital has always found a way to brush aside those lying at its feet as it flourishes. Our fight for a single-payer system in the United States is about more than just the fact that healthcare is a human right. It’s about justice, and the separation of people’s healthcare needs from the slave-like economic conditions into which they are being forced. Now more than ever, we need Medicare For All, and the Boulder DSA is standing tall in the face of those who have come here and taken so much more than they could ever need, waving the banner of our simple belief: Heal the Sick, Tax the Rich.
