Single payer activists from around the country started arriving in Chicago today for two concurrent conferences.

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) will be holding its annual meeting at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel.

Less than two miles south, Health Care Now, the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare and One Payer States will be holding a Single Payer Strategy Conference at the Chicago Hilton.

The two groups will come together at points throughout the weekend, starting this afternoon with a rally outside the Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower near Chicago’s Millennium Park in support of single payer.

Speakers at the rally will include Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, Martha Kuhl, secretary-treasurer of National Nurses United, PNHP president Dr. Robert Zarr, and Dr. Nahiris Bahamón, a pediatric resident at the University of Chicago.

The participants will say the U.S. should no longer rely on private health insurers – whose main goal is to maximize the bottom line – to finance care, this despite the fact that most of the groups and individuals organizing the conferences supported President Obama’s push to pass the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — thinking it was a stepping stone to single payer.

But as single payer activist Dr. John Geyman points out in his soon to be published book — The Human Face of Obamacare: Promises vs. Reality and What Comes Next — instead of being a step toward single payer, Obamacare was instead a leap back into the arms of a private insurance industry that hiked premiums, denied care, cancelled policies, narrowed networks, jacked deductibles, drove doctors to burnout, fueled the rise in medical costs, raided the public treasury, bloated the bureaucracy and corporate profits, privatized Medicare and Medicaid, decreased the quality of care, and left 30 million Americans uninsured.