JB: Great perspective. Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?
CP: Yes. Join the campaign. You do not have to be a physician to join PNHP. If you want to know more about what we do and support our work, visit our website at www.pnhp.org.
JB: Thanks so much for talking with me, Carol. What delicious irony it would be if this new president has precipitated the momentum necessary to launch single-payer nationwide!
***
Dr. Carol Paris's bio:
Dr. Carol Paris 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 a dramatic 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.
***
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).