If we get a health reform bill, it may be thanks in part to a push from the ground up. That belief is leading to a variety of grassroots support endeavors.
At a hospital-sponsored town hall meeting on the issue this week in San Francisco attendees were invited to take the microphone to tell their stories. Probably a bad idea at any meeting, since such an invitation guarantees off-point rambles and rages and this one certainly proved the point — but there were enough horror stories to assure everyone that our current non-system is a train wreck.
A cardboard cut-out of President Obama stood at the back of the room (there was a lot of photo-op going on before things got started) and the promise was that videos of the stories would go straight to Washington to help speed passage of the hoped-for health reform bill.
Participants told of needed care that couldn’t be found, needed drugs that couldn’t be bought and the widespread suffering of the un- or under-insured. A panel of local experts presented aspects of the hoped-for national plan and spoke of San Francisco’s own moderately successful effort to provide health coverage for all.
Speakers were asked to keep their remarks to under three minutes, another dictum doomed to failure, and a few did. My own plea (one minute, forty seconds) was for inclusion of some guarantee/protection of individual choice at the end of life. It stemmed from working for many years (as I still do) with terminally ill adults who seek options including hastening their dying. It was tempered in deference to the hosts, since St. Francis is a member of Catholic Healthcare West and the opposition of the Catholic Church was largely responsible for defeat of a widely popular physician aid-in-dying bill that narrowly failed in California two years ago. And the likelihood of such a controversial issue getting into the massively complex bill we may or may not get is somewhere between slim and none, but what the heck. With Mr. Obama standing there, I couldn’t resist.
At similar gatherings around the country, I suspect the message and the messengers are much the same. Health reform is a national need that translates in millions of heartbreaking individual stories.
My personal favorite message came from panel member Catherine Dodd, PhD, RN, District Chief of Staff for Nancy Pelosi in her pre-Speaker days. Dodd explained the current three-fold status (two in the Senate and one in the House) of the healthcare bill and defended its probable cost. Then she threw out one new number: 19.7. After everyone had let 19.7 sink in, she told us that is the number of years it has taken this country, every time a health reform bill has been floated, to bring it up again. “We can’t afford another 19.7 years,” she said. I think she’s right.
