By Tom Raithel
Evansville Courier & Press
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
An Evansville native who is now a physician campaigning for a national single-payer universal health plan will bring his message home May 3 in a speech at Central Library’s Browning Events Room.
Dr. Rob Stone, an emergency room doctor in Bloomington, Ind., is a leader in Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan, an Indiana affiliate of Physicians for a National Health Plan.
Stone said the group’s mission is to educate the public and the Legislature about the benefits of a “publicly financed and privately delivered” national health insurance plan that would provide health care for all Americans.
His presentation, sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Southwestern Indiana, is open to the public.
Roberta Heiman, the organization’s president, said her research of information from the U.S. Census Bureau shows 14 percent of Indiana’s population, or more than 860,000 Hoosiers, are without any health insurance, including 159,000 children. Nationally, she said, the statistics show 44.5 million Americans are uninsured, and more of them live in working families.
Stone, who is medical director of the Community Health Access Program in Bloomington, describes the current health care system as “a non-system of sickness care” with a huge chunk of health care dollars going to insurance company profits rather than patient care.
Stone has been speaking around the state to explain the group’s reform proposal.