Marilyn Clement Was a Champion of Single-Payer Health Care and Now Winner of the BuzzFlash's Wings of Justice Award

WINGS OF JUSTICE

Marilyn Clement

_{Speech from Marilyn Clement from June 7, 2009}

Many of those who are visible in the health care battle are the screamers who invoke Nazi imagery. But those tirelessly fighting for healthcare reform often do so quietly, behind the scenes, trying to raise the American standard of health care for all.

Marilyn Clement was one of those people. Clement, who was founder and national coordinator for Healthcare Now, passed away earlier this month at the age of 74 after a long fight with multiple myeloma.

Healthcare Now, formed in 2003, utilizes single-payer activists in the trenches to work in local organizations across the country.

Clement had been at this healthcare reform for some time. During the early 1990s, she formed "Health Care: We Gotta Have It," an organization of women advocating for single-payer health care.

Marilyn Clement had been at this whole activist realm starting in the 1960s with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, doing research for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC. Her other stops in five decades of service include civil rights groups such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In her time, Clement must have seen so many peaks and valleys in the fights for a better way. But as you read one tribute after another, you get the sense that this was a person, driven, to leave the world in a better place.

From the Progressive Democrats of America:

"We extend our deepest sympathies to her family and will always remember Marilyn as an example of what one person can accomplish against extreme odds. Most recently the national coordinator for Healthcare NOW!, Marilyn was a prominent and driving force for single-payer healthcare in America. Her leadership and generosity of spirit will be sorely missed… It is up to those of us who remain to carry on Marilyn's work. Single-payer advocates will mourn her death, and we'll use our grief to power our actions for a just and humane single-payer healthcare system that places people's needs over corporate profits."

The fight for decent healthcare reform took up a considerable part of her later years. But you certainly get the impression that she wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Though Clement remains with us only in spirit, we wanted to display some of that spirit. In her own words from an appearance on Democracy Now! in 2007.

"We need healthcare now. People are desperate. Desperate. And 18,000 people are dying every year, simply for lack of healthcare coverage of any kind. And so, think about how many thousands of people will die between now and 2012. So we're putting forward a single-payer national healthcare system for everybody that would cost a lot less money. Think about every dollar you spend on healthcare: one-third of it now goes to the insurance companies for their profits, their administration, their advertising, their lobbyists, so if we take that one-third that we're now spending on spurious -- we don't need them, we don't need the insurance companies -- and that would cover literally everybody who is uncovered in the United States for a lot less money and provide for the kind of system that most countries in the world, most of the advanced countries in the world, enjoy. So we're saying, join us."

For championing numerous causes, especially single-payer health care, we posthumously award the Wings of Justice to Marilyn Clement.

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Nominated by BuzzFlash staff. To see a full list of past Wings of Justice honorees, click here.

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