And the longtime activist and organizer Marilyn Clement has died at the age of seventy-four after a battle with cancer. She was founder and national coordinator of Healthcare-NOW. Over the past five decades, she worked for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the African National Congress, and The Guardian newspaper. Marilyn Clement appeared on Democracy Now! in 2007 advocating for a single-payer healthcare system.

Marilyn Clement: “We need healthcare now. People are desperate. Desperate. And 18,000 people are dying every year, simply for lack of healthcare coverage of any kind. And so, think about how many thousands of people will die between now and 2012. So we’re putting forward a single-payer national healthcare system for everybody that would cost a lot less money. Think about every dollar you spend on healthcare: one-third of it now goes to the insurance companies for their profits, their administration, their advertising, their lobbyists, so if we take that one-third that we’re now spending on spurious — we don’t need them, we don’t need the insurance companies — and that would cover literally everybody who is uncovered in the United States for a lot less money and provide for the kind of system that most countries in the world, most of the advanced countries in the world, enjoy. So we’re saying, join us.”