Partners for Dignity & Rights works with grassroots partners to build a powerful people’s movement dedicated to winning a universal, equitable health care system. We envision a health care system that is publicly financed, prioritizes health over profits, is democratically controlled, equitably meets communities’ needs, and guarantees health care as a human right and public good to everyone.

With our core partners in the Healthcare Is a Human Right Collaborative—Put People First! Pennsylvania, Southern Maine Workers’ Center, and Vermont Workers’ Center—we support broad-based organizing led by communities who are directly impacted by the commodification and denial of health care, including poor and working class people, people of color, immigrants, women and LGBT people, people with disabilities, and rural communities. Together we are working to transform the health care system and to simultaneously use health care as a strategic issue around to build a much larger working-class human rights movement bringing people together across lines of division including race, nationality, geography, and age. In Vermont we won the first legislation in the country putting a state on the path toward universal, publicly financed health care, and are now working to win policies to guarantee dental care to everyone on Medicaid and to ensure that states’ health care systems are governed accountably, transparently, and with meaningful participation by patients, residents, and health care workers.

We also work proudly with a number of other partners all over the country to build support for Medicare for All and state-level universal, publicly financed health care, including the Campaign for New York Health, Center for Popular Democracy, Healthcare NOW!, Healthy California, Labor Campaign for Single Payer, National Nurses United, People’s Action, Physicians for a National Health Program, and Public Citizen. Our national work focuses on supporting on-the-ground organizing, producing legal and policy analysis centering equity and democratic governance, and developing strategic communications to shift the prevailing political consensus from supporting inequitable, profit-driven health care to equitably guaranteeing health care for all.

For more information, check out:

• HealthcareIsAHumanRight.org, our website for the Healthcare Is a Human Right Collaborative, which includes a resource library and campaign toolkit for organizers and advocates.
• Our human rights analysis the Medicare for All Act of 2019
• Parroting the Right, our report documenting how the health insurance industry has manipulated the nation’s public discourse on health policy to thwart popular demands for public action