WASHINGTON (NNPA)— The Rev. Walter Fauntroy remembers well the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. And he wants to see them replicated in the final push for a robust government-sponsored option to be included in the health insurance reform legislation that is now being wrangled over in Congress.
“When we peaceably assembled in Selma, there were people who didn’t respect the First Amendment and threatened us with billy clubs and prison and we said, ‘Do it, do it in front of the cameras.’ That raised public awareness and pricked the conscience of enough people to say to their political leaders, ‘Don’t let your name show up on my ballot if you haven’t voted for the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act,” recalled Fauntroy, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and 1965 marches in Selma, Ala., a compatriot of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“There is a direct parallel between what we did in the Civil Rights Movement and what we’re doing now to protect access to health care,” Fauntroy said, adding that such activism would be necessary “as long as we are subjected to the tyranny of the insurance companies, who terrorize hospitals and terrorize doctors and terrorize individual citizens for the benefit of their stockholders.”
The civil rights heavyweight was a chief organizer, along with U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), of an informal, near five-hour long hearing held on Capitol Hill on Oct. 27 to discuss the costs of a broken health system and the benefits of a government-sponsored plan.
Money has, so far, dominated discussions about health care reform, said Jackson Lee, who added that most detractors of the public plan already had insurance.
“This hearing aims to allow the voice of the American people who want a strong public option to be heard in the halls of Congress —voices that have been drowned out by insurance company propaganda, and disruptive tea baggers at health reform town hall meetings,” Lee said.
Those voices — physicians, activists, church leaders patients and loved ones of those who died due to lack of health coverage — all agreed that the public option is a necessity if ethnic and racial health disparities are to be addressed, if health costs are to be managed and if lives are to be saved.
“Like a good mother I brought pictures,” said Philadelphia resident Joan Kosloff, showing off photos of her son, Eric, a “street lawyer” who died of pneumonia after several visits to the ER.
“I am haunted by the loss of my son, who would have been alive this day if he only had health insurance and regular physician to care for him,” she said tearfully.
Several doctors testified about sick patients they were forced to treat for free, turn away and who died because of a lack of health insurance or the unwillingness of an insurer to cover a medical procedure or medicine.
According to a September article in the New England Journal of Medicine, 63 percent of doctors support a public option.
“If you don’t think the system is broken, ask your doctor. We see the gaps and inequities every day in a system that all too often puts every other interest ahead of patient care,” said Dr. Alex Blum, a pediatrician and field director for Doctors for Americas, an organization of 15,500 physicians who support universal health care. “We can do better than allow profit-driven bureaucrats to decide what medicines patients receive.”
Dr. Renaisa Anthony, whose dream was to treat the underprivileged in her home city of Detroit, said she hung up her coat after losing an aunt and grandfather to cancer and heart disease because they lacked health insurance.
“I boycotted our current health care system because I was disgusted and disheartened by the reality that 90 percent of the patients I choose to serve as a doctor — my family and community — could not get an appointment with me if their life depended on it,” said Anthony, who teaches at George Washington University.
Vilified as a socialist agenda by Republicans, deemed too expensive by conservative Democrats and undermined by the faltering support of the White House, the public option had been declared dead by Senate committee leaders a few months ago. That is, until lawmakers — perhaps goaded by public polls showing overwhelming support for a public option — two weeks ago reintroduced the provision to the measure that has now come out of committee.
The fact that the provision made it back into the bill is “significant,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “It’s indicative that the public is having an influence on this debate.”
But there are concerns, he added. “How do you define the public option? The definition is critical.”
Chairman Conyers — who supports a public option paying providers a rate at Medicare plus 5 percent — said he questioned the legitimacy of the public option as currently written as it allows insurance companies to negotiate insurance rates, allows states to “opt out” of the plan — which he said undermines its efficacy — and would only allow the public option to be put in place when activated by a “trigger,” i.e., if insurance failed to offer affordable coverage in that place.
Citing newspaper headlines touting the public option, the veteran lawmaker said, “Look, please, don’t bring me that crap. I’ve been here too long. I don’t buy it. I suspect the (insurance corporations) are going to try still to take it away.”
Given the inordinate influence of insurance lobbyists on the legislation, he added, he suspects the bill would come out of conference with even weaker language.
“I know what happens in conference between the House and the Senate….This (conference) room has a shortage of electricity and when those lights are out, stuff goes out (of legislation) and others get in and when the lights are back on there are things in there and nobody knows how they got in.”
That lobbyists for the health insurance industry — about 3.5 per member of Congress — have been so successful in undermining health reform points to a deeper, constitutional issue, lawmakers said.
‘’The only legitimate public option —s ingle-payer — was taken off the table, so who was at the table? Health insurance corporations,” said outspoken Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich. “There is a deeper discussion here; this isn’t only about health care. We’re talking about whether we are truly a democracy or whether we have a plutocracy run by corporations.”
People have to “become revolutionary” to “overcome this over privatization of the American government,” Conyers said. And the revolution could start with just the people gathered for the hearing. “It doesn’t take a lot of people to make change in this nation, thank God. Martin King proved that.”
Fauntroy said they are considering a march on Capitol Hill among other measures to influence lawmakers to include a robust public option in the legislation. He admonished advocates to continue fighting and said he believes that like civil rights and voting rights, universal health care will become a reality in the end.
“I want to assure you that if we don’t give up and don’t give out and don’t give in, we shall overcome,” he said.