Crumbs at the Democratic convention

Ady Barkan, a single-payer activist who is dying of ALS, knew his appearance at the Democratic National Convention was fraught. “I support Medicare for All and Joe Biden obviously doesn’t,” he told The New York Times ahead of his Tuesday speech, which, because he’s lost the capacity to speak, he delivered through a computerized device. “Many Democratic voters agree with me, as evidenced by the overwhelming support in the exit polls during the primaries. And the pandemic and depression have proven how dangerous it is to tie insurance to employment.”

Which is maybe why Barkan’s speech didn’t really feel like it was about Biden at all. How could it be? “Like so many of you, I have experienced the ways our health care system is fundamentally broken,” he said. “Enormous costs, denied claims, dehumanizing treatment when we are most in need.”

He then went on to enumerate the cruelties of our for-profit health care system, which I would argue isn’t so much broken as it is working precisely as intended. A small group of people have grown very rich and richer still in the middle of a global pandemic in which millions are left without access to medical care. The only mention of Biden came at the end of Barkan’s speech as a kind of rhetorical two-step: “We must elect Joe Biden,” he said, then added that “we must act together and put on his desk a bill that guarantees us all the health care we deserve.”

I was so moved by Barkan’s speech and so furious that he had to give it on behalf of a candidate and platform that has rejected Medicare for All in order to preserve a system that chooses money over human life every single day, a feeling that Barkan also spoke to in his interview with the Times. “I definitely don’t want to be co-opted,” he said when asked if he was worried that the party had embraced him as a spokesperson only to reject his policies.

“Franklin Roosevelt did not run as a progressive reformer in 1932,” Barkan said later in the interview, refocusing his attention on movement pressure. “Lyndon Johnson was a Southern segregationist for the first two decades of his career, until he began to transform himself in the late ’50s. Even Abraham Lincoln was a moderate compromise candidate for the Republican Party in 1860. And yet, all three presided over bursts of social, legal, and political revolutions because the American people demanded them. I hope that the same can be true of President Biden.”

I don’t know that I share Barkan’s faith in Biden’s capacity for change, but I know he’s right to believe that when it comes to fighting for what we deserve, all we have is each other.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor