Nurses’ Campaign for Medicare for All (medicareforall.medium.com)

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This moment

Welcome to 2025, when we have been overwhelmed putting out literal and figurative fires across the country. But even now — especially now — nurses remain dedicated to our fight to win Medicare for All. And we hope you are with us.

This is a critical moment for our movement. We are faced with a huge threat, and a massive opportunity.

The threat is clear. Trump and the Republicans are determined to decimate public health care spending so that their fellow billionaires and the corporate health care industry can profit. Meanwhile, they will do nothing to actually address the problems of our rigged health care system. They will make it worse.

This is a crisis and we must respond. Nurses oppose any and all attempts to take health care away from people. We will fight to defend our patients, as we always have.

This moment is also critical because it presents us with an opportunity. An opportunity to make health care a defining political issue of the next four years.

If you are reading this, you probably already know that we need Medicare for All. You are probably wondering how we can make progress during these challenging times.

We have a plan for how to fight against attacks on health care as we also fight for Medicare for All.

It is not guaranteed to succeed. In fact, the odds are stacked against us. But we know that we can win if enough people — people like you — step up and commit to taking action together. Are you with us?

The threat

Let’s start by talking about the threat that the new administration poses to health care, and how we can respond.

The Trump administration will try to cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in order to pay for their tax cuts for the wealthy. They will try to expand Medicare Advantage, the privatized Medicare option that is worse for seniors and run by private insurance companies, to enable these companies to make ever-greater profits at the expense of our seniors and our Medicare tax dollars.

Trump and the Republicans will stand on the side of corporations and billionaires and sell out the working class. It is government by the rich, for the rich.

These existing health care programs aren’t perfect. But simply taking them away, cutting their funding, or handing more power to the health care industry will only make the crisis worse. We must fight back.

How we fight back

Nurses stand against any and all attempts to take health care away from our patients. We believe that we can win this fight if enough people step up and take action.

We can beat Trump. He’s not as strong as he thinks he is, and we’ve beaten him before.

Trump did not win the election by a landslide. There is no huge mandate for his agenda. His 1.6% margin of victory is tiny by historical comparison. He has razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate. Trump is the oldest person to be inaugurated president and is a lame duck, already in his second term.

During Trump’s first presidency, he was defeated time and time again. During the first weeks of his second presidency he has already suffered losses: He had to give up on his plans to freeze federal grants and loans, and his attempts at a trade war were shut down without any major wins for his agenda. His attacks on health care can be stopped too.

The attacks by the health care industry and the Trump administration will be varied and sustained. We need to be dynamic and agile in how we respond.

That is why we are asking you to join our new Rapid Response Team. You can sign up here.

As a member of the Rapid Response Team, you will help to quickly coordinate efforts to push back against attacks. We will work with other organizations that believe in health care justice. We will use any tactic at our disposal: from organizing actions, to contacting elected officials, to flooding social and traditional media with our messages. These tactics were successful during Trump’s first term. But they only work if lots of people get involved and take action together.

How we build something better

While we must fight back against attacks on health care, we cannot just fight to defend the status quo. The status quo is a rigged system that only works for the big shareholders and CEOs of the health care industry.

We deserve better and we demand better.

We must keep fighting for a proper solution to the health care crisis. We must keep fighting for a world-class system that guarantees care for all. We must keep fighting for Medicare for All.

We know that this fight looks hard right now. We are up against a powerful health care industry, an emboldened Republican party, and a Democratic Party that is in disarray and that has consistently failed to address the health care crisis.

We know that there is not a clear path to winning Medicare for All in the next four years, but we truly believe that the conditions are there for us to make health care a defining political issue: if we are focused, organized, and if enough people step up and get to work.

The opportunity

While the election has created a huge amount of danger and risk, it has also created an opportunity.

Everything is on the line. Everything is up for grabs.

We already know that Trump and his agenda are not widely popular. His attacks on health care will make him even more unpopular, and these attacks will further focus attention on health care: It is already one of the issues that people are most concerned about, but we can expect this to increase.

The health care industry is also wildly unpopular. People are sick of being ripped off. We don’t have to convince people that the industry is the main obstacle to a properly functioning system, but we do have to help organize that anger, and let people know about the alternative.

Poll after poll — including one conducted last year by National Nurses United (stay tuned for more details on that soon!) — consistently show that Medicare for All is a popular policy across all demographics, and across the political spectrum. Even a majority of Republican voters support Medicare for All, as well as an overwhelming percentage of Democrats.

All of these are reasons why the Democrats should be championing Medicare for All. Fighting for health care justice would highlight that Trump is on the side of the billionaires and big business. Taking a stand against the hugely unpopular health care industry would show that they will fight for the working class.

We hold no false illusions about the Democrats. Too many of their leaders are beholden to the health care industry. They have failed to fix the health care system. They have had plenty of opportunities and they have not guaranteed health care for all. They need to realize that this failure is a key reason to understanding why they lost in 2024, and that adopting Medicare for All will be key to them winning again.

We cannot trust them to reach the right conclusions by themselves. We need to show the Democrats that their failure to fix the health care system helps to explain why they lost and show them that championing Medicare for All is how they can win.

There are two ways that we can make elected Democrats listen. One is to engage directly with them; we have to be willing to speak to members of Congress and demand that they stand with the people and fight for Medicare for All. The other way is to keep ramping up the attention on the health care crisis so that they are forced to respond.

So here’s our opportunity: use Trump’s attacks on working class people to build our movement. Use the disarray in the Democratic Party to make them champion a winning cause in Medicare for All.

Our Plan

We want to share our plan with you, because you will be central to it. We hope that you agree with us that it is essential to fight back against Trump’s attacks and to build for Medicare for All. We hope that you will commit to being an organizer and volunteer in this crucial moment.

Firstly, we must get organized, both to fight back against attacks on health care and to fight for Medicare for All.

It’s crucial that we are prepared and organized to defend health care, and that we use these attacks to recruit people into our movement (again, you can join our Rapid Response Team here). We must also get organized in our communities. In these hard political times it is important to get together in person. We draw our strength from our community and from feeling the solidarity of the people who stand shoulder to shoulder with us in the fight for health care justice. Trump tries to divide us, we must unite.

In the coming months we want to work with you to organize House Parties all over the country to do this. These House Parties will be a chance to get together with people from your local community to talk about the threats to health care and to plan for winning Medicare for All.

If you can commit to hosting a House Party, sign up here. We will give you all of the support you need to make it happen.

This is our chance to invite people into our movement: people who are feeling scared, alienated or angry by what the current administration is doing. People who want to do something, but need guidance on how to get involved and get active. There were millions of people who were mobilized during the first Trump presidency. We need to help these people plug into our movement. There are millions of people suffering because of the rigged health care system: We need to help these people fight for an alternative.

We think that getting together in person is the perfect antidote to the seeds of division and fear that Trump is trying to sow.

Once we are organized, we must take our fight to our opponents. Yes, that means standing up against Trump, but it also means directly challenging the Democrats. We will tell the Democrats that the time is now to fight for health care justice. When Medicare for All legislation is reintroduced into the House and the Senate later this year, we will use that as a chance to challenge the Democrats directly.

After the House Parties, we will support groups of volunteers in congressional districts across the country to meet directly with their members of Congress and demand that they support Medicare for All.

But the crucial first step is House Parties across the country. Please step up to host one in your community.

We will use the attacks on health care to highlight how politicians are standing with the billionaires and the health care industry instead of working people. We will use the re-introduction of Medicare for All legislation to show people that there is a real alternative to the rigged system.

We are not saying this will be easy. We know that the odds are stacked against us. But we have an opportunity, and we know how to respond to an opportunity: We organize.

We can win.

There’s a real danger that we spend the next four years just responding to Trump, constantly on the back foot. Or worst still, that overwhelmed by his actions and attacks, the fear and distress many of us are feeling will lead to despondency and inaction. Trump’s shock-and-awe tactics are making people feel scared, and bewildered. His intention is to overwhelm us and divide us.

These are classic union busting tactics and they don’t scare us. As a union we face down bosses like him all the time. And we beat them.

This is not a time to bury our heads in the sand. Remember, this is what our opponents want. They want us to think we’ve lost before we even have the fight. Don’t give them that victory.

If you doubt that we can do this, take a look at what we have done together before. In the last 10 years Medicare for All has become hugely popular with levels of support near record highs. It has also reached near historic levels of support in Congress, with more than half of House Democrats cosponsoring the legislation in 2022. We have seen the first-ever hearings on Medicare for All in the House and Senate. We helped make Medicare for All one of the main issues at the 2020 Democratic primaries.

It really hurts that we have not won yet when every day of delay has life-and-death consequences for so many people, but we cannot lose sight of the progress we have made. This progress is down to the hard work of people like you. Like all great movements for justice, ours is powered by ordinary people stepping up, getting organized and taking action. Your work organizing canvasses, phone banks, and barnstorms, talking to your friends, family and neighbors, supporting political candidates that champion the cause and challenging those that don’t — this has driven the progress we have made, and it will be key to winning in the future. We can’t wait to work alongside you.