For 35 Years A Group Of New Yorkers Has Been Fighting For Universal Healthcares And They're Not Stopping
The New York Health Act has been introduced in the state legislature every session since 1991, when Assemblyman Richard Gottfried first put it forward as a response to the growing number of New Yorkers without adequate health coverage. In those 35 years, the bill has changed sponsors, gained and lost momentum, been amended and refined, and never passed. The people who have been fighting for it have also changed over those decades, but the core of the coalition looks remarkably like it always has: nurses and doctors who have spent careers watching patients delay care over cost, small business owners who want to offer their employees something better, and ordinary families who have absorbed medical debt that should not exist. Marita Florini, a retired nurse practitioner who spent 38 years in primary care, has been one of them since the beginning. Her reasoning has not changed since Gottfried introduced it the first time: there were too many people with no insurance, or with coverage so full of gaps it barely counted, and the people providing their care could see it happening in every exam room every day.
The New York Health Act, if passed, would make every New York resident eligible for comprehensive health coverage with no copays, deductibles, or out-of-network costs, covering physical health, mental health, dental, vision, prosthetics, durable medical equipment, and ambulance services, funded through a payroll tax and existing federal Medicaid and Medicare dollars. Dr. Cori Marshall, a family medicine physician at Sayre Family Practice in Pennsylvania who sees patients on both sides of the state line, supports the bill as both a provider and a patient: during her own pregnancy with twins in 2024, preterm labor scares led to a transfer to an out-of-network hospital, and she ended up with $6,000 in medical bills despite having what she describes as good insurance. The New York Health Act would have eliminated those costs entirely. She said what the bill offers is steadiness: coverage that is not tied to a job or a partner, that follows a person through divorce and layoffs and career changes, that does not disappear at the worst moment. The bill is currently in the Senate Health Committee, sponsored by Senator Gustavo Rivera. It has been in similar positions before. The people carrying it have learned not to measure progress in years, and they are still showing up.
