CPHS Summer Appeal

We hope everyone of our partners and allies are well and safe throughout this COVID-19 pandemic.  I am calling on your generosity to support the work and mission of Commission on the Public’s Health System.  We had to postpone our April Gala for the late fall or winter and expect challenges in funding from the city and foundations. This is our biggest event to generate funds.  We also took a lost in funding in this year's NYC Budget.  We need your donation to hold the line and strengthen our education, policy and organizing to resist the systemic attacks on our health care and public health system by the state, city, Trump administration and their private industry allies. 

CPHS was formed before our incorporation in 1991, because of the threats of privatization and closing of public hospitals. It grew to address the shortcoming of our health care system. Today, we continue to address problems that our marginalized communities have historically faced. These problems stem from policies, decisions, and decision-making structures to legitimized, facilitate, and maintain systemic and institutionalized racism, xenophobia, classism, misogynism, homophobia, transphobia and discrimination arising from disabilities.   These have contributed to the systemic issues in the delivery of health care and the continued role it plays in structuring disparities from the neighborhood to the individual level and from the individual through the neighborhood. 

I want to say this American health care system never was my health care system and probably true for you too, and yet we can together make it the public’s health system.  The pandemic reaffirmed why CPHS is relevant for two major reasons:

• A medical focused only fix will not address this problem, as it is not asthma, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension that are to blame for this disparity. It is not even the virus. Rather, it is White Supremacy, a racist and profit driven heath care system, and previous city, state, and federal budgets and decisions.  All that have contributed to disproportionate exposure for chronic and mental health diseases, hospitalization, over-use of emergency room, negative health impacts from environmental pollution, disability, death, and financial troubles for our public hospital and other safety-net health facilities.
• Our simple mission statement “fight for equal access to quality health care for everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, language spoken, diagnosis, or the ability to pay”  is real, connected to what is going on,  valuable and essential.

Help and donate to us not because we are in another public health crisis, but to normalize equity, to change the cruel indifference of government to marginalized communities well before this pandemic, create a anti-racist health care system, and assist in reducing the likelihood that ever again a virus could easily and disproportionately ravaged, hurt and cause death in our communities.  Let us confront the challenges together.