Weekly “Forward” Profiles GBIO Role in Health Reform |

Weekly “Forward” Profiles GBIO Role in Health Reform

Posted on July 22, 2006 by HCFA

Interesting article in the July 21 issue of Forward, the progressive Jewish weekly, on the role played by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization in Massachusetts health reform: “Religious Liberals Take Lead In Massachusetts Health Debate.” The article discusses GBIO’s role going forward into implementation, as well as the national context of GBIO’s work and the debate over the role of faith-based organizations in US politics. Click here to read.

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5 Responses to Weekly “Forward” Profiles GBIO Role in Health Reform

Mary Neely Eldridge says:

July 29, 2006 at 1:02 pm

It seems ironic that the only posting after mine would steer readers to “heyjokes.” When I issued my invitation for Mr. McDonough and Rabbi Pesner to be open with other health care advocates and post their positions on the future of the Health Care Constitutional Amendment, I was not joking. The plight of the uninsured and underinsured of Massachusetts cries out for ALL health care advocates to work collaboratively and to avoid back-room dealings that undercut one another. Surely, Health Care for All – MA can work for its own positive actions without sabotaging actions that other health advocates see as positive and needed. I “worked the streets” of East Boston the day before the Constitional Convention and spent hours talking with health care workers at the East Boston health clinic. Every one of them expressed support for the amendment. As do the great majority of health care providers who provide direct services. They should be allowed to vote on the Health Care Constitutional Amendment, rather than see it die as a result of behind-the-scenes deal making.

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Mary Neely Eldridge says:

July 26, 2006 at 10:41 am

The current, counter-productive and truly heartbreaking scene of the director of Health Care for All – MA, with the support of the respected Rabbi Pesner, undermining years of work by other health care activists should stop now. Mr. McDonough and Rabbi Pesner should declare their position to the coalition of organizations that support the Health Care Amendment. They should state whether they support and will work to convince legislative leaders to bring the Health Care Amendment to the November 9 Constitution Convention for a yea or nay vote, or whether they will oppose this action. They should take an open and honest stand. There should be an end to the behind-the-scenes machinations that are so destructive to citizen participation in bringing about improvements in the lives of those in great need. I invite Mr. McDonough and Rabbi Pesner to post replies on this blog stating their positions regarding whether or not the Health Care Amendment should be brought to the Constitution Convention in November.

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Alice Rothchild, MD says:

July 24, 2006 at 9:36 pm

The postings by Ann Eldridge Malone, RN and Rabbi Jonah Pesner are both inspiring in their commitment and passion to providing healthcare for the uninsured in Massachusetts. At the same time, there is much we can learn from our ongoing experiences.
As the Rabbi stated, there will be people who obtain important benefits from the recent legislation and that is to be applauded. Nonetheless, Ms. Malone has raised serious issues with regard to how activists work together, support or undermine each other, how the health care industry affects the struggle, and how we providers and consumers can best build a strategy that leads to universal access to high quality, affordable health care in Massachusetts. The recent backroom dealings regarding the Health Care Constitutional Amendment is a case in point. While Chapter 58 is heralded as a major step forward in health care access, many thoughtful people have raised questions regarding the long-term viability of such legislation.
On 11/5/05, Alan Sager and Deborah Socolar in the Boston Globe raised serious concerns about the “inefficient, temporary patchwork that cuts the number of uninsured people, but boosts both spending and the number of under-insured people.” They examined the issue of inadequate employer funding, the economic incentive to shift workers to state-sanctioned plans, and the reduction of benefits to control costs. They noted that high patient payments tend to make patients avoid essential and unneeded care, that commercial insurance can never be fair and efficient, that employers will have economic incentives to drop insurance coverage that will lead workers into cheap high deductible coverage.
Other analysts have stated that the legislative estimates for health care cost are enormously underestimated and could only be obtained by high out-of-pocket payments or severely restricted options. The financial stability of Chapter 58 is also unclear and there is a lack of clear definition of “affordability” for the individual worker who is at risk for being penalized for lack of insurance. Then there is the question of the negative financial impact the funding will have on the free care pool. The bill appears to bolster profits for private insurance companies who paid lobbyists $7.5 million to fight for the bill, and hurts low- and middle-income residents.
On 4/17/06, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote, “This Rube Goldberg contraption won’t even get him [Romney] off the ground because it doesn’t touch the underlying problem—our reliance on multiple private insurance companies.”
Clearly, expanding care is an admirable goal and cannot be underestimated. Nonetheless, serious health care activists agree that affordable, high quality, universal health care access involves moving away from the marketplace. This means creating a markedly less bureaucratic system that controls costs through oversight and public health planning, that treats health care as a right and not a commodity or a privilege.
That is the meaning of the Health Care Constitutional Amendment that was recently buried in a legislative study committee.
The tragedy is that activists who know this have not always worked together to create a truly visionary and sustainable plan. It is totally defeating and indefensible when we undercut each other. I urge everyone working in health care reform to behave as principled allies in this difficult struggle.

Alice Rothchild, MD
Alliance to Defend Healthcare

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Rabbi Jonah Pesner says:

July 24, 2006 at 12:42 pm

I offer the following words in reaction to Ann Eldridge Malone’s posting regarding the Forward coverage of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organziation role in the recent Massachusetts health care victory. I don’t know her personally, but am deeply moved by her passion for health care justice. Her vision for health care as a universal right is deeply moving (and one I share, along with many GBIO clergy and leaders).

This past July, 650,000 of our brothers and sisters in the commonwealth had their dental benefits and eye care restored as part of the legislation that was passed. Tens of thousands had their basic benefits restored. And this coming October, hundreds of thousands of real folks – many who stood in the pouring rain collecting signatures – hundreds of thousands will be able for the first time to qualify for quality, affordable health care.

The entire nation is watching as Massachusetts moves toward the goal of unviersal care. We have restarted a national conversation in which the notion of significant expansion of health care access is viewed once again not only as a moral goal, but as a practical one as well.

Surely this is a great victory for Massachusetts; I know it is a victory in the lives of the many women, men, and children who in the months ahead will finally receive quality, affordable care.

With blessings for all those who strive for health care justice,

Rabbi Jonah Pesner
Co-chair
GBIO Health Care Campaign

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ann eldridge malone says:

July 23, 2006 at 8:35 am

I share some background below to give context for how deeply upset–feeling a sense of betrayal of basic honesty and decency –that I and other individuals and organizations working for fundamental healthcare reform are feeling about the exploitation of religious groups and faith-inspired individuals by individuals at the group “Helaht Care For All” to work on something that has been revealed to be, in large measure, a sham. It sickens me. It is enough to make a person severely heartsick as well as morally outraged.

So many people suffer and die unnecessarily for lack of health insurance coverage in Massachusetts, as they do in all states, and the “ACT!” campaign led by the group “Helath Care for All” was from the start intended not to fundamentally address and solve that crisis but to be a simple tactic to pressure legislators. As many have explained to me and I have confirmed independently, “ACT!” was never intended to achieve universal or “near universal” healthcare, only to get modest incremental reforms and to leave intact our obscenely unfair, wasteful, and dysfunctional healthcare system.

I have great respect for the indiviidual GBIO members who gave their time and effort to collect signatures for the “ACT!” ballot initiative. I know how hard that work is, having collected hundreds and hundreds of signatures myself for various progressive citizen initiatives over the years. I do not have respect for what has been knwon by many activists for many months, that the signatures collected by GBIO members and others were NOT , and likely were never intended to lead to a statewide ballot question to expand fairly funded healthcare coverage.

The “historic compromise” legislation called Chapter 58 falls grossly short of meaningfully addressing fair funding needs nor does it achieve sustainable expaned healthcare insruance access. So for “Health Care For All” to re-print this article from Forward about what GBIO did to help advance healthreform is grossly misleading. It calls for the truth to be revealed.

I’ve been a nurse for 13 years working with the underserved at places like Health Care For the Homeless, with the VNA providing homecare in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, and teaching nursing students in med-surg in various hospital settings to community health with the Healthcare for the Homeless and homecare with the poor.

Most recently (fall of 2003) I helped collect them to create the universal Health Care Constitutional Amendment Campaign. Prior to that I collected (in 1999) over 2,000 signatures, working as a team with my husband and our elderly babysitter, to help put Ballot Question 5 for universal Health Care on the Nov 2000 ballot.

In 2005 it was very inspiring how many GBIO members took up the call for providing health care for all and toiled to collect signatures, a task that might sound easy until you really set out to do it in any great number and do it correctly within the law. I knew that passion and sense of justice was there to work on this humanitarian and social justice issue of healht care access.

I had called and met with Lew Finfer from GBIO in 1999, pleading for their organization to help us with our Universal Healthcare ballot initiative that sought to establish a state universal coverage healthcare program and to limit administrative spending in healthcare to 10% (in order to spend our state healthcare dollars more responsibly and to lay the groundwork for affordable, sustainable universal coverage program). I left a packet of materials including the petition sheet, overview fact sheet, and the list of groups who had signed on.

Lew told me that day in 1999 that GBIO was focusing on housing issues so it was unlikely they would participate in the Universal Helathcare ballot initiative that came to be known as Question 5. We toiled on and collected over 100,000 signatures in the Fall and 30,000 in the Spring of 2000 to place our universal healthcare question on the statewide ballot to become a binding law.

“Health Care For All” cut a backroom deal led by Tom Finneran (House Speaker at the time) and HMO lobbysts to abandon Question 5 in exchange for a peice of incremental legislation. These same HMO’s that had been trying in other ways to crush our citizen initiative for affordable universal healthcare with legal limits on Admin. spending.

These same Mass. “Non Profit” HMO’s gave over $5 MILLION DOLLARS (health insurance premium payment dollars paid by individuals and employers in teh state) to massively fund the deceitful NO on Question 5 campaign led by Richard Lord at AIM–Associated Industries of Massachusetts). We volunteer citizen-activists, adandoned by “Health Care For All” had collected from our own pockets, $100,000 to run the YES campaign.

Ballot Question 5 to create an affordable universal healthcare program lost 48% to 52% on the statewide ballot in 2000.

The health reform heaalthcare justice activists who had given so much of ourselves to Question 5 were feeling crushed. But we picked oursleves up and carried on, creating the citizein initiative Health Care Constitutional Amendment campaign http://www.HealthCareForMass.org. to establish a constitutional right to affordable, comprehensive and equitably financed healht insurance for all state residents.

We went across the state as much as we could in 2002 and 2003 and we invited, asked, we pleaded with other individuals and groups whose stated goals include working on expanding healhtcare access to become a part of this historic effort to make healhtcare our right.

The group “Health Care for All” never became a real part of this effort or helped the campaign. The group did endorse it by name and give testimony at the April 2004 legislative hearing after many many months of our requests. The group did not assist in any way with signature collection nor did they help spread teh word to others that this important effort was underway and needed the help of other health justice activists.

And now, it has become public knowledge that “Health Care For All” has been working against passage of the Health Care Amendment to make healthcare a permanent right for all. Please contact me if you want to understand and learn more about this, or if you can help this sincere and justice-founded effort to enact theMassachusetts citizen initiative amendment to achieve health care for all. Thank you for your time.

Ann Eldridge Malone, RN
Alliance to Defend Health Care
1534 Tremont St, Mission Hill, MA 02120
617-541-3300 Cell 617-784-6367
http://www.DefendHealth.org

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