Chris Maisano

Chris Maisano

Chris Maisano is a member of the Young Democratic Socialists New York City chapter. He studied at Rutgers and Drexel University and in 2010 worked as a librarian at a large public library branch in Brooklyn.

DSA Economic Crisis Group

In 2009 Democratic Socialists of America member Rob Saute was the primary mover behind the establishment of NYC DSA Economic Crisis Group, which has since attracted the active participation of Karie Gubbins, Jason Schulman, Michael Hirsch, Itzhak Epstein, Peter Frase, and Chris Maisano.

It will attempt to use such understandings to conduct economic organizing in New York City, produce a small number of short pieces of popular literature on the crisis, and conduct public educational fora that will advance an analysis and program of action that reflects the ideological and political orientation of DSA in the broad left, which could use an infusion of the kind of visionary yet pragmatic radicalism that is our organization’s hallmark. Such activities will also be aimed at recruiting new members who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of the crisis and who are open to embracing the particular intellectual and political contribution DSA can make. We believe that these goals are achievable, and that any socialist organization worth its salt should have a theoretical and practical program concerning the deepest crisis of capitalism in 80 years.

Young Democratic Socialists

As of September 2009 Chris Masisano was Activist Editor of the Young Democratic Socialists.

Bringing down Medicaid

Writing on the Young Democratic Socialists website on March 22, 2010, Maisano explicitly called for a new application of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. Maisano recommended that activists work to deliberately overload Medicaid to the point of failure, forcing the Federal government to assume full responsibility for all health care - or "single payer' socialized health care.

Maisano wrote;

With yesterday’s passage in the House of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed...

However, there are many serious flaws in the bill that will put single payer back on the political agenda sooner than we may think. The indispensable and indefatigable folks at Physicians for a National Health Program cataloged many of them in a press release earlier today, but they only briefly touch on an issue that I think could potentially be a central aspect of single-payer strategy in the coming years: Medicaid and the fiscal crisis of the states...

Under the plan that Congress will pass, about half of the roughly 30 million people that would gain access to health insurance coverage would be placed in Medicaid. Medicaid is funded jointly by the federal government and the states, but the combination of dwindling tax receipts and surging enrollment – an estimated 3.3 million people joined the program in the last year alone – has severely impaired the states’ ability to meet their Medicaid obligations. This has forced many states to cut Medicaid reimbursements to doctors, resulting in drastic hardships for many Medicaid recipients. .. Since state budgets are not expected to return to health any time in the foreseeable future, Medicaid expansion could potentially break the budgets of many states around the country...

Maisano on to invoke a revival of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which was credited with almost bankrupting his hometown New York in the late 1970s.

So what does this all have to do with formulating a winning strategy for the single-payer health care movement? To begin to answer this question, we need to look back at an old strategic proposal that I think has acquired a new relevance in the political terrain created by the passage of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill...

In 1966, scholar-activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (a long-standing DSA member) wrote an article for The Nation called “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty.” In the mid-sixties, Cloward and Piven found that only about half of the families eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (what welfare used to be called), were actually enrolled in the program. Recognizing the political opportunities this gap between welfare law and practice presented, they formulated an analysis that became known as the “Cloward-Piven strategy.” As they explained in their book Poor People’s Movements, the strategy had two main components...

Maisano directly quoted from The Nation article;

"If hundreds of thousands of families could be induced to demand relief, we thought that two gains might result. First, if large numbers of people succeeded in getting on the rolls, much of the worst of America’s poverty would be eliminated. Second…we thought it likely that a huge increase in the relief rolls would set off fiscal and political crises in the cities, the reverberations of which might lead national political leaders to federalize the relief system and establish a national minimum income standard. It was a strategy designed to obtain immediate economic aid for the poor, coupled with the possibility of obtaining a longer-term national income standard" -

Maisano then goes on to say;

As efforts to win single payer through traditional organizing techniques and engagement with the established political system fail to bear much fruit, the crisis provoking strategy proposed by Cloward and Piven may be our best way forward...

Maisano's strategy?

So here’s what I would propose as the next step in single payer strategy: explode the Medicaid rolls. Single payer activists should organize in their communities to sign up as many eligible people as possible for Medicaid – if the administration wants to expand Medicaid coverage, then let’s give it to them. Many people would get the health coverage they need in the short term. In the longer term, the system would probably not be able to support all of them when the financial burden shifts back to the states. Popular pressure could then be mobilized to force drastic federal intervention to deal with the ensuing crisis, possibly including the implementation of single payer...

NYC DSA steering committee

In 2009 New York City Democratic Socialists of America elected a new steering committee, with Maria Svart as chair, Chris Maisano as secretary, Kenny Schaeffer as treasurer, David Yap as membership coordinator, and Jason Schulman as at large member.