EVERY YEAR, CCMP DELIVERS.
Without paid staff, government or strings-attached funding, CCMP volunteers and members fill medical, dental and optical requests from low-income workers throughout the SF Bay Area.
80+
DONATED MEDICAL SESSIONS
500,000+
POUNDS OF FOOD DISTRIBUTED
to low-paid workers’ organizations
100%
RUN BY VOLUNTEERS
OUR MISSION
Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals (CCMP) is an all-volunteer effort established in the Bay Area community in 1976. As a matter of policy, CCMP is independent from any government or strings-attached funding. CCMP is structured as a free and voluntary unincorporated private membership association. CCMP’s primary purpose is to overcome political and economic barriers that deny access to comprehensive medical care for any and all working people. This has included conducting campaigns to defeat laws or governmental policies detrimental to the interests of low-income workers.
Governmental policy leaves poor and working class people a “choice” — skyrocketing co-pays and deductibles they cannot afford, or no coverage at all. Health insurance does not equal health care. CCMP’s program is based on the principle that everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, must have access to comprehensive health care.
CCMP volunteers aid service workers, independent contractors, part-time workers, owners of small businesses and others without affordable access to preventive health care.
OUR HISTORY
CCMP started in 1976 out of the organizing efforts of low-income service workers and in-home caregivers in north Oakland, in response to the lack of access to preventive health care and the pervasiveness of undiagnosed and uncontrolled health problems among the poorest urban workforces. Volunteers saw the need to find ways and means to prevent illnesses such as diabetes upon witnessing the prevalence of foot and leg amputations among domestic and service workers and the elderly and disabled. Such preventable diseases were causing premature deaths across the low-income worker strata. As this need grew, CCMP’s office was formally established in Oakland, serving the five-county San Francisco Bay Area.
CCMP cherishes its independence to fight to change policies that presently deny access to comprehensive medical care. Hence, CCMP chooses not to pursue tax-deductible status, as organizations seeking to change existing laws or government policy are not eligible. Furthermore, CCMP is not a charity, and the low-income workers requesting our medical benefit do not want a charitable handout; access to health care is a right that low-income workers are often denied.
As conditions in the medical field worsen, with almost 50% of all doctors in the United States experiencing symptoms of burnout and profit-driven demands increasing, CCMP’s organizing drive is more important than ever. CCMP volunteer advocates and medical professionals unite with low-income workers in order to organize the demand for comprehensive health care.
“If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?”
— Dr. Paul Farmer M.D., Ph.D.
OUR PROGRAM
CCMP’s program stands as an example of how much could be accomplished if we had a health care system that made services and resources available to those most in need, and did not deny access to health care due to one’s income or age. CCMP’s program incorporates medical care, ancillary health services, procurement of healthy food for supplemental food distributions and joins with organizations of low-income workers whose members suffer lack of access to quality, affordable care.
CCMP’s program is based on the principle that everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, must have access to comprehensive health care. CCMP’s definition of comprehensive health care was developed directly from an analysis of the economic determinants of poor health and the inadequacy of extant government health services encountered as CCMP volunteers worked with benefit program recipients from associations of low-income workers, including medically uninsured or underinsured workers to provide them access to preventive health care services.
Using an organizing methodology that emphasizes tenets of self-help and patient education, our volunteers and members provide free preventive medical care in comprehensive programs designed to prevent, locate, and/or treat illnesses that stem from the lack of access to adequate preventive health care, nutrition, and other necessities of health.