Armed with bulging satchels of imposing data shaped to bring the most skeptical stragglers aboard the bandwagon to make healthcare reform happen in Congress by next month, two advocates forcefully made their cases last night before a willing audience at the Culver City Democratic Club.
Nancy Gomez of the advocacy group Health Access, who pitches for a living, made a series of both sweeping and fascinating assertions whose sound may have been more convincing than their contents. But her strategy clearly clicked.
Both fast-paced and compelling, the speakers, Ms. Gomez and Maureen Cruise, a retired nurse who formerly worked in Culver City, indicated that the winds of political momentum favored them at a crucial moment of perhaps underappreciated national urgency.
“We must have reform now,” both ladies said repeatedly.
Enthusiastically waving the banner of the single-payer concept, their twin fire-engine messages were freighted with a familiar theme:
Health care reform must be passed by within weeks. Otherwise, desperate Americans no longer will be able to stave off irreversible family disasters.
Half of the Task
In celebrating the dramatic passage of one version of healthcare reform, by the House of Representatives shortly before the bars closed last Saturday night, the ladies sought to enlist their listeners in an aggressive and immediate campaign to push the bandwagon through the problematic U.S. Senate, starting next week.
They met no objections from the crowd.
Just as many portions of the dense, 1,993-page House version are not popularly understood, Ms. Gomez found herself in a similar predicament.
Working under a 20-minute time limit, Ms. Gomez marshalled her arguments and crunched her normal 60-minute presentation into lights-out salesmanship. She unreeled a streak of “worsts” and “lowests” and “leasts” for the largest state in the union.
“Californians are particularly important in national healthcare reform,” she said, because the largest state in the union is worse off than any other.
“About 20 percent of Californians, 7 million, are without health insurance,” she said. “We are the worst state at providing employer-sponsored health coverage,” and millions more are stuck with inadequate coverage.
Under the House bill, according to Ms. Gomez, 94 percent of Californians would be covered, although she did not cite a year for that prediction to be fulfilled.
“We rely heavily on public health programs,” she said.
“But because of our state budget deficit, they are being decimated. And it is getting worse. We have a lack of affordable health coverage options.
“In some cases, the lack of insurance is not a matter of affordability. Some of us cannot get coverage, not because we are priced out of the market. It’s just that you just are uninsurable if you have a pre-existing condition.”
Perhaps in her zeal, Ms. Gomez may have occasionally mis-stepped, such as when she said, “The status quo is not only unaffordable but unattainable.”
Her employer, 20-year-old Health Access (www.health-access.org) has organized a mammoth campaign to shove through reform this season in Washington.
“What does our campaign stand for?” Ms. Gomez asked. The No. 1 motivation is “to reduce long-term growth of healthcare costs for business and government. We can protect families from bankruptcy or debt. About 65 percent of bankruptcies in America are caused by medical debt.”
Ms. Cruise decried the claim that opponents of the present structure of the reform bill are spending $100 million to defeat it. She did not acknowledge, however, that proponents mounted a $150 million campaign last summer to pass it.
Democratic Club Notes: At the behest of club member Tony Pappas, Democrats voted to send a letter of protest to City Hall over the City Council’s decision earlier this year to halve the time for public comment at meetings. Instead of allotting 20 minutes for subjects pertaining to Council, but not on the agenda, and, separately, 20 minutes for topics not on the Redevelopment Agency agenda, it was agreed to limit the pre-meeting comment period to a total of 20 minutes. Others could speak at the end of the meeting. Unfair, said Mr. Pappas…
