"I'm saying to my peers, this will be our last battle, the battle that brings universal healthcare, This will really be our legacy."

Isaac BenEzra

Isaac BenEzra likes to talk about how the pharmaceutical industry is ripping off America.

As he traverses Massachusetts, speaking at mostly senior centers, he tells the tales of what has gone wrong and how it can go right again, relating to audiences with an uncommon passion and energy.

“We are talking about millions of Americans who are uninsured or underinsured, who are tired of Mickey Mouse incremental approaches, tired of excuses about having to pay the highest retail drug prices to finance pharmaceutical research and development when taxpayers already contribute more than $20 billion in research and development,” says BenEzra, 76, the state membership director for the Massachusetts Senior Action Council. “The pharmaceutical companies are fleecing a vulnerable population and that means thousands are cutting pills or not filling prescriptions.”

Linda Stone, the Western Massachusetts organizer for Mass Senior Action Council, is perpetually moved by the force of his message.

“I’ve heard him speak probably 50 times, and I still just get choked up when he says the same message,” Stone says. “Hearing from him somehow is very inspiring. It’s just his emotional presence. You know he feels strongly.”

“I think you have to care,” says BenEzra, who has been advocating better health care for 50 years. “It has to be real.”

BenEzra also talks a lot about CanadaRx.net, a website where Americans can get drugs at Canadian prices. But he is careful to point out why the price disparity exists.

“It opens up the issue of why they have national health insurance and their government uses a population of 30 million to negotiate lower prices,” he says. “If we could do the same thing with 280 million people, imagine the savings.”

Typically, BenEzra will also pass out a Mass Senior Action petition that calls upon the Congress of the United States to enact legislation that will establish a universal prescription benefit and price controls on all prescription medicines. He’s hoping for 60,000 signatures. The petition has 8,000 so far. He talks about building a movement, what he calls “the first civil rights movement of the 21st century.”

“We are talking about saving lives, members of families this has impacted on, a government that is insensitive, and corporate greed,” says BenEzra. “And when you talk the talk and walk the walk, we can organize.

The response? “This is the hottest issue since white bread politically,” he says.

BenEzra has been active on health care issues for a long time, dating back to the early 60s when he organized the first public polio clinics in Bucks County, PA, just outside of Philadelphia.

Growing up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the Great Depression as a child with rheumatic fever, he observed first-hand how the welfare system worked.

But his culminating experience came in 1952, when he went to visit his mother one day and instead found a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He later found his mother in the waiting room of a hospital that had neither a bed for a woman on welfare nor an available ambulance to take her elsewhere for care. BenEzra finally took his mother by cab to another hospital. She died two weeks later.

“It had a profound impact on my own value system, and how I look at the issue of injustice as a universal problem,” BenEzra said. “In order to be able to realize your potential, you have to have your health. It’s an issue of justice, because there are millions of people who never realize their potential because they don’t have their health.”

BenEzra’s most recent spate of activism got started about three years ago, when Kaiser Permanente, the only HMO in Hampshire County, Mass., left the East Coast, creating a crisis in affordable healthcare. Distributing flyers for a rally while standing outside of a supermarket, BenEzra was told to leave. He refused and was arrested. When asked his name by the officer, he identified himself as Rosa Parks.

Following the Kaiser Permanente departure, BenEzra helped organize a local chapter of Mass Senior Action and has been an active member ever since, going around the state giving talks, recruiting members, and bending the ears of policymakers.

“Working with people is my medium,” he says. “Shaping ideas, changing them, finding a way to make things better…I think we’ve contributed much in the way of dialogue to create demand in the public for a prescription plan.”

But BenEzra hasn’t focused solely on prescription drugs. When a local hospital announced plans to lay off 50 nurses a few years ago, he helped distribute flyers, organize a group, and held a series of community meetings on the impact. As a result, the lay-off announcement was withdrawn.

While BenEzra uses his people skills to organize, he also tries to teach people the importance of motivating themselves.

“I work as hard as anybody else building an organization, but I’m also teaching people how to be empowered,” he says. “We can learn so much if we empower each other. That’s what’s making a movement, to learn that you can make change, you can make a movement, and you don’t have to be alone and learning how to get together.”

Though he reaches out to people of all ages in his talks and hopes for an intergenerational solution, he ultimately sees the fight for universal healthcare as the final victory for the generation that won World War II more than five decades ago.

“My generation has been called ‘the greatest generation’,” he says. “But I’m saying to my peers, this will be our last battle, the battle that brings universal healthcare. This will really be our legacy.” For more info, visit www.masssenioraction.org or call 413-533-9235.