A handful of South Side residents, University of Chicago students, and representatives from No Games Chicago, STOP, and the Illinois Single Payer Coalition marched with posters and chanted "healthcare is a human right!" to decry the Medical Center's decision to close a women's clinic on 47th St. at the end of June. Though the protest primarily criticized the Medical Center for disregarding poor people, it nonetheless implicated the city's Olympic bid—and the bid's potential cost for taxpayers—as part of the problem.
Some of the posters raised the question of what public service trade-offs the city may make to fund the Olympics: several read "Better Clinics—No Olympic Games," and one asked, "what do you get tax breaks for?"
For Tom Tresser, the No Games member who brought the "Better Clinics..." posters, the issues of medical services and the 2016 Olympics are inextricable.
"We have the same goals," Tresser, a resident of Lincoln Park, said of the protesters and No Games. "we're trying to make the city better from a grassroots level. One of the things [No Games] has been saying all along is that we want better trains, better schools, better clinics—and not the Games."
Guidi Weiss of the Ill. Single Payer Coalition expressed similar concerns to Tresser's but cautioned that the point of the protest was not to criticize the Olympic bid.
"Today is specifically about the closing of the women's health clinic," she said. The Medical Center "is basically saying 'we don't make money by serving the community.' ... We the tax payers are funding this hospital and the hospital is refusing to serve us."
The Olympics and the health clinic's closing are "completely separate issues," Weiss, a Hyde Park resident, added. "But it's true that the money we spend on the Olympics won't be spent on health care."
"That money is all coming from the same source; it's coming from us, the taxpayers, and we should have a say in where [it] is going."
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