By Mark Binker
Greensboro News & Record
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
GREENSBORO — When she lost her job a decade ago, Kirby Heard joined the N.C. Farm Bureau so she could get health insurance. But when one of her payments arrived late, her coverage was terminated.
That, the High Point graphic designer told the Regional White House Forum on Health Care Reform on Tuesday, was when she joined the growing ranks of uninsured. Between 750 and 1,000 people attended the forum at the N.C. A&T Alumni Foundation Event Center on Benbow Road.
The event was one of five regional health reform forums that the White House says will build on a national gathering in Washington earlier this year.
Since losing her insurance, Heard, 52, said she has gotten treatment from a community care network, a group of local health providers that tries to coordinate medical care for people without insurance. Gov. Bev Perdue, who moderated the event, praised those networks as something the federal government should help expand.
“If you need a specialist, they can’t cover that,” Heard said, adding she was grateful for the care she could get. “I have a lot of achy-painy kind of things that are specialist oriented and I have learned to live with them. … I’ve been on a waiting list to see a dentist after losing a filling for eight months now.”
Also on hand Tuesday was Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office for Health Reform. She told the audience that President Barack Obama has set two main health care goals: lowering the cost of services and making sure that everyone has some sort of health insurance coverage.
DeParle and Perdue called on people who had been pre-selected to tell their stories as well as people in the audience such as Heard who raised their hands.
Obama addressed the gathering by video.
“Through your own experience, you know what works, what doesn’t,” Obama said in the message. “I look forward to hearing your ideas.”
After the forum, DeParle said the federal government was in the “sausage-making process” of trying to craft a new national health care strategy, a task that has befuddled presidents going back more than a century.
When asked how forums such as Tuesday’s would play into that crafting, DeParle said it was important for the administration to see different ways states are helping to provide health coverage to those without.
“The personal stories are really something you take back,” she said, recalling Heard’s story as something that would stick with her. “You don’t lose that story, so it makes you understand the problem better. … On the good side, I heard more first-hand and saw more first-hand about the community care network and how that is working.”
As participants made their way to the forum, about a dozen protesters waved signs and chanted slogans in favor of a single-payer health care system, one that would be run by the federal government.
“Because the people say so, insurance companies got to go,” protester Marcia Everett, 46, yelled into a bullhorn.
“We are trying to encourage them to take a serious look at single payer,” Everett said. Advocates for that viewpoint felt they were initially excluded from the first White House forum and still say it’s an option the Obama administration should consider more closely.
“Single payer is the only way we can provide health care for everyone and save money,” said Jonathan Kotch, who heads Health Care for All N.C.
That viewpoint had sympathy inside the forum, and at least one presenter explicitly made the point. In the audience, Albertina McGirt said she wasn’t sure single-payer was the way to go but said something needed to be done.
A breast cancer survivor who describes herself as fiftyish, McGirt said she had health insurance when she got ill. But she still had to pay 20 percent of what it cost to beat back her disease.
“That 20 percent was monumental. After treatment, I was teetering,” she said. “Instead of being poor I was just ‘po.’ ”
McGirt said she hoped changes could be made to help people avoid those kind of financial trials.
“Whatever we do, we need to approach it carefully,” she said. “You must talk to those people who are in it, who have been affected by it.”
Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com