Connecticut already had racial and economic inequalities and a health care crisis before Covid-19. But the pandemic brought them into relief — and opened a door to change.
So said Roger Senserrich of the Working Families Party, as he discussed the labor-affiliated party’s agenda for the upcoming state legislative session.
Senserrich offered that preview Tuesday during a discussion with host Babz Rawls-Ivy on WNHH FM’s “Love Babz Love Talk” program.
Health care at the top of that agenda. (Read the party’s 2021 legislative agenda here.)
“It’s not that the virus kills people of color more often, it’s that we have a public health crisis that’s been going on for decades,” Senserrich said.
The party’s 2021 agenda includes passage of a public healthcare option that extends Medicaid, providing hazard pay to healthcare workers, and expanding state-funded paid sick days.
‘We learned this year that everyone’s health depends on everyone else’s,” said Senserrich. “If one person is sick and doesn’t have the resources to take time off and has to go to work the next day, they can get a lot of other people sick too.”
The first section of the agenda is entitled “Emergency Care, Now,” and aims to support the “hundreds of thousands of workers in CT [who] have lost jobs and healthcare in 2020 … and people of color [who] have borne the brunt of our economic and public health crisis.”
“When we talk about emergency care now, we are going to target immediate relief for those who have suffered the most,” said Senserrich. “And we know who they are, because we have seen them in our communities. Any relief we do needs to help those who have been hit the hardest. This starts with healthcare. A lot of people lost their insurance when they lost their jobs. It quickly became a jobs crisis. So, people lost their care in the middle of the worst health crisis in over a century. We cannot have a healthcare system that works like this.”
The pandemic was the catalyst for addressing three other related “crises,” Senserrich argued: a jobs crisis rooted in economic inequity, a climate crisis, and “our country’s final reckoning with racial inequality.”
“If there’s one thing we learned from this absolutely insane year, it’s that nothing we learned from the pandemic was because of the pandemic,” said Senserrich. “They were reflections of long-existing structural inequalities we have in our country.”
The WFP generally cross-endorses Democrats who back a progressive agenda, though it sometimes runs its own candidates for local office.
