A small crowd gathered on the steps of San Francisco City Hall yesterday morning to announce the launch of a national campaign for universal, affordable health care. Sponsored by a progressive coalition calling itself Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the campaign seeks to designate affordable, universal health care as the first order of business for the new President and Congress in 2009. Presenting a set of guiding principles that address issues ranging from fair risk sharing to preventative services and racial disparities in coverage, the coalition is demanding health care legislation that promotes choice for patients and regulation of health insurance companies.

The event was held simultaneous to one in front of the Los Angeles County Hospital that was intended to spotlight that city as “ground zero” for the health care crisis nationally, with one of the highest rates of uninsured in the US. The San Francisco event, by way of contrast, was intended to demonstrate the extent to which health care reform is feasible, and many speakers lauded the Healthy San Francisco program as a model for universal coverage that should be extended state and nationwide.

The extent to which that program’s maximum income cap has left certain working-class San Franciscans uninsured went unmentioned. This, however, seemed reasonable, as the campaign does not purport to lay out a specific plan for implementation of universal health care. Rather, speakers focused on the principles guiding HCAN’s statement of common purpose and the urgency with which health care reform should be addressed in this country.

The statement of common purpose (available via www.healthcareforamericanow.org) lists 15 guiding principles underlying the campaign’s call for choice in coverage between private and public insurance plans and greater federal regulation of the health insurance industry. It substantiates the philosophical underpinnings of HCAN’s Which Side Are You On? petition and campaign, which is ultimately intended to delineate those legislators who support the choice they advocate from those who support sourcing of health insurance by individuals or organizations as it exists today. Art Pulaski of the California Labor Federation likened the choosing of sides to allying oneself either with President Bush or uninsured janitors.

Speakers focused on the moral and economic underpinnings of the call to action. John Arensmeyer of Small Business Majority spoke to the rising premiums that are increasingly shrinking the already small margin of coverage that small business owners can afford to offer their employees. He impugned this lack of access as “antithetical to the modern, twenty-first century economy” and cautioned that it threatens the US economy in the global marketplace.

Paul Kumar of SEIU described this country as being in a “moment of crisis” as pertains to health care for the working class, and denounced failure to act as “neither morally nor economically viable.” Doctors and Planned Parenthood representatives cited the health disparities between the insured and uninsured, with a third-year resident from Children’s Hospital in Oakland reminding the audience of the dangers posed to the chronically underinsured by the current economic crisis.

One speaker interwove the moral and economic motivations for HCAN’s campaign particularly succinctly, and provided a rather apt analogy for what it aims to achieve. Dr. Stuart Bussey of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, AFSCME, noted that the Great Depression gave birth to Social Security. He then challenged legislators to take this current recession as an opportunity to implement another necessary federal protection program, which he called “Health Security.”