Kay Tillow
A standing ovation and prolonged applause followed Dr. Quentin Young’s announcement that PNHP’s Dr. Quentin Young Health Activist Award was being given to Kay Tillow, Coordinator of Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare. The award reads, “In the finest tradition of activism for social change, she has brought the single payer vision to new constituencies.”
Earlier in the day on November 4, 2006, 250 members heard Tillow address the annual meeting. She described her work convincing labor unions across the United States of the importance of formal endorsements of Congressman John Conyers’s United States Health Insurance Act, HR 676.
As a result of her work, hundreds of American unions with hundreds of thousands of members have signed resolutions supporting a single payer national health insurance plan for the United States.
Her grassroots vision of achieving formal HR 676 endorsement resolutions from labor, all the way from small individual union halls to state UAW’s, has been an inspiring victory in the single payer movement. It provides a powerful political tool to convince policy makers that the single payer plan is the solution to our nation’s health care dilemma.
Kay Tillow is the Executive Director of the Nurses Professional Organization and Coordinator of Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare.
Following Kay Tillow’s award, Drs. Rob Stone, Chris Stack, and Aaron Carroll were recognized for bringing the single payer vision to new constituencies in Indiana.