Held during the early evening in front of the famed Arlington Theater in downtown Santa Barbara, the demonstration was organized primarily by the Santa Barbara chapter of Health Care for All, as part of its statewide issues campaign called One Care Now. This campaign is boosting public and political support for California Senate Bill 840, sponsored by State Senator Sheila Kuehl.
The demonstration featured clever signs and street theater about the plight of people with no or insufficient health care insurance. This OLPA video includes remarks by the demonstrators and people buying tickets for the SiCKO documentary film, called a "reality show" by one of the theatergoers in this video. A crisis of reality indeed, the theatric trailer for SiCKO is embedded within this OLPA video, along with an excerpt of the OneCareNow video that describes SB 840.
Some critics of Michael Moore refer to his films as SHOCK-UMENTARIES, as if that is such a bad thing "to shock and possibly anger the audience" for raising awareness and enacting social change.The health care demonstration held on the sidewalk in front of Arlington Theater occurred only 31 days prior to the TV debut of this OLPA episode, a fast turn-around time for the OLPA production schedule, essentially bumping everything else in queue for the video recording and producing schedule. We are glad to feature this topic on an expedited schedule while SB 840 still is under deliberation in the State legislature and facing an expected veto by Governor Schwarzenegger, the self-declared Man of the People. Apparently, by "of the People" Arnold only meant the rapidly shrinking number of people who have adequate health care insurance that will never fail them for coverage.
A large rally to mark the end of 365 consecutive days of events that support SB 840 and health care reform is planned for Saturday, 11 August, at Los Angeles City Hall. OLPA will be there to cover this event and interview people from Santa Barbara who participate, including Peter Conn and Paulina Conn, the local leaders with Health Care for All.
Health Care Reform march down State Street, 07June2007.
Photo by Paul Wellman for Santa Barbara Independent
Our title Scrubs for SiCKO for this OLPA episode refers to the name of the statewide outreach campaign organized by California Nurses Association. The CNA events were large and prominent elsewhere, but for this event in Santa Barbara only one nurse was there in her commemorative scrubs garb, along with many other medical colleagues in traditional scrubs who were interviewed for the video.
As Peter Conn notes in his concluding interview, local news coverage was disappointingly skimpy for this event held that beautiful summer evening. However, KCSB covered the event well with an audio news story by Harry Lawton, a retired UCSB professor who deftly melds news reporting, political analyzing, and film reviewing all in one 8-minute story.
Watch the Video of this show!!
For a FULL SCREEN option, link on the Google label and also be sure to select arrow icon there for the Smooth Video option.
As a technical note, this video includes too much time (15 seconds) for the still image at the beginning before the intro, intended as a solution to accommodate a glitch that no longer applies because the clunky video playback system has been replaced at Santa Barbara Channels TV. The end of the video includes 8 minutes of blank black space because the DVD recorder stopped too late.
