Vermont and Healthcare Reform Organizing: Human Rights Promise and Praxis

The human rights framework represents an important foundation of global activism for universalized healthcare. In the United States, in the state of Vermont, activists have recently centered on human rights claims in their efforts to pass successful, though tenuous, health reform legislation. This research, which examines singlepayer and universal healthcare campaigns across the United States in the wake of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, centers on these recent social movement innovations in Vermont. We present the results of 36 in-depth interviews with state and national leaders in the single-payer movement and consider how the human rights framework has entered into their strategic organizing, and how they interpret Vermont’s experiences. This analysis of organizing efforts in Vermont reveals a deeply complex understanding of and engagement with human rights. Key organizations and activists in Vermont have undertaken a new approach to utilizing not just the ‘Healthcare Is a Human Right’ frame, but also an ethic of rights-based powerbuilding in their organizing approach. At the same time, not all actors or organizations have coalesced around this frame or this approach, creating some tensions within the movement, most notably between perceptions of activism led by elite policy experts versus grassroots actors. It has also contributed to broader speculation about what might lead to success for the single payer movement in a post-Affordable Care Act health policy landscape. The findings highlight significant understandings of both the value and vulnerabilities of human rights organizing toward universal healthcare in the US context, in Vermont and beyond.