PNHP NY Metro's Monthly Forum

Featuring: Carol Paris, M.D., National President of Physicians for a National Health Program

Dr. Carol Paris is the president of Physicians for a National Health Program. She is a recently retired psychiatrist who worked for more than 25 years in private practice, community mental health, prison psychiatry, and academia. In the course of her experience, much of which was in Maryland, she became an outspoken critic of the private-insurance-based U.S. health care system.

In May 2009, she and seven others stood up, one by one, at a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing on health care reform chaired by Sen. Max Baucus to ask why there wasn’t a single advocate for single-payer health care on the 41-member panel. In an action that received national media attention, Baucus had all eight peaceful protesters, including Dr. Paris, arrested. (Charges were eventually reduced, requiring only community service.)

Dr. Paris subsequently toured the country as part of the “Mad as Hell Doctors” campaign for single payer, and spent a year as a consultant psychiatrist in New Zealand, where she experienced a single-payer system firsthand. She currently resides in Nashville, Tenn., where her primary interests include strategic activism, recruiting and mentoring medical students and early career physicians for leadership positions within PNHP, and building coalitions to strengthen the single-payer movement’s impact on the national health care debate. Dr. Paris obtained her medical degree from West Virginia University School of Medicine.

Join PNHP New York Metro for a discussion on the rapidly growing national movement for universal, single-payer healthcare. Dr. Paris will provide updates on the two bills for such systemic change in Congress: H.R. 676, now sponsored by Rep. Keith Ellison, with 122 co-sponsors, and S. 1804, sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 16 co-sponsors. She will explain the differences between the two bills, and ways in which the Sanders bill can be strengthened. In addition, Dr. Paris will critique the new “Medicare Extra for All” proposal from the centrist Democratic Center for American Progress, a seriously deficient plan put forward to disrupt momentum toward single-payer.

Dr. Paris will also summarize the recent history of work by Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) to advance single-payer nationwide, and how support has been rapidly growing among various constituencies, particularly in the past two years. She will end with ideas on how to escalate that growth, and what everyone can do to help.

Following her talk, there will be a discussion with the audience – your ideas on movement-building are valuable!