Leadership
Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director
Robert L. Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. Previously, Borosage founded and directed the Campaign for New Priorities, a nonprofit organization calling for post-Cold War reinvestment in America. He is the author of “The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement.” Borosage’s work has appeared in a number of mainstream and progressive publications, and he is a frequent television and radio commentator. In 1988, he was senior issues advisor to the presidential campaign of Rev. Jesse Jackson. He has also served as an issues advisor to many progressive political campaigns, including those of Senators Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Boxer, and Paul Wellstone.
Roger Hickey
Co-Director
Roger Hickey is a founder and co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. He was also one of the founders of Americans United to Protect Social Security, a coalition of citizen leaders representing consumers, workers, women, seniors, young people, civil rights advocates, and community activists—united to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. Americans United is now working on Medicare prescription drugs and other issues. Hickey also helped found the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington think tank that looks at economics from the point of view of working Americans. Hickey served as EPI’s vice president and director of communications. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Hickey began his career in the 1960s as an organizer for the Virginia Civil Rights Committee and the Southern Students’ Organizing Committee.
Organization’s Objective
Almost all Americans find themselves either uninsured, underinsured or at risk of becoming uninsured – and because more and more Americans are at financial risk if they or a family member need costly care, paying more and getting less for their health care coverage – there is a widespread sense that our health care system is in crisis.
Our current system is built on the eroding foundation of employer-based coverage, individual coverage, and a patchwork of welfare-style programs aimed to insure discrete population groups but that are always at risk of losing funding. It fails to address the need for a health care system designed to assume responsibility for vulnerable and at-risk individuals of all ages and income groups across the nation, including the 10 percent of the population who consume 70 percent of health care costs, fails to protect the citizenry from financial risk if they need expensive treatments, fails to focus on public health, and fails to guarantee people the health security they deserve throughout their lives.
Without change that unites us, Americans face powerful forces pushing to shift as much of the risk of needing health care to individuals as possible. These same forces are already pushing to dismantle and privatize successful programs, especially those that have provided crucial health security for the elderly and people with disabilities. While resisting expansion of health care for new populations, like children, these forces aim to starve Medicare of funds and promote individual responsibility for health care coverage. They claim public insurance like Medicare is unsustainable—even as it does a better job of reining in costs and guaranteeing affordable care than private insurance—while failing to mention that the end of Medicare will likely mean denying health security to as many as 43 million more Americans. At the same time, they starve Medicare of funds and promote public subsidies to private health insurance companies, which cannot rein in spiraling costs, cover the uninsured or provide health security to tens of millions of working families.
Affordable Health Care
