A group of leaders from the congregation gathered to reflect on the moral obligation to provide quality, affordable health care for all people.  After prayer and reading from Scripture, Rev. Edward Matthews, the former Pastor, offered a faith reflection based on the writings of Thomas Moore: “The things dear Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to work for.”

“If we’re going to pray for the relief of the poor, for a new health program, we have to work for it,” Rev. Matthews said. “And this group right here is committed to do that.”

Watch the news coverage of the event in Little Rock, Arkansas, below:

I have to admit that on my way to DC I didn’t know what to expect but still I was excited just knowing that GOD is good and his work is so rewarding.  I had a thirst to leave a touching memory of our family’s stories and the message that affordability is soooooo important to all of us across the nation!  I kept thinking to myself…. “how can I make a difference and bring it back home proudly?”.  Karen and I shared some stories and knew that we had a big trip ahead of us…. Unsure of the specifics, but ready to go.  It’s funny because I thought I talk a lot, but Karen keeps up with me!!! Lol.

Okay, when we got to the hotel I had NO ROOM reserved and the hotel was full!!!  I got a little worried and realized this was not how I was going to allow my trip to start nor end.  Ended up with a great room!  Thank you Jesus!  In this room Hannah 1 and 2, Tim, Karen, Angela and myself put together our skills and came up with our plan for capital hill! I had the meat of my part as Chair, but knew I needed to sleep on the dessert!  Oh! This first night we all became Policy Experts  love it!

We got an early start meeting with Boxer and Feinstein’s offices and leaving a huge stack of stories with their staff member, but we certainly made great efforts to succeed in our goals.  Great teamwork Karen! Straight to the press conference we went. Powerful, Powerful testimonies given by every single one of our Leaders.  Powerful Prayer and We looked GREAT!  Gordon and all the staff,Thank You!  Your leadership is outstanding!

Then we had just an insightful, informative and motivating meeting with Health and Human Services where I feel proud to be a part of as we were highly respected and appreciated as a National organization.  Congratulations to all of you!!!  Our efforts across the country were recognized as the driver of Healthcare Reform Affordability and we felt really good about this visit.  I felt smarter and smarter!  Karen and I walked over to Congresswoman Susan Davis’ office and met with Spencer Young.  This was informal but productive and I let him know that we wanted to recognize Susan and him for their continued support.  Susan was scheduled to fly in from San Diego that evening @ 5:30pm., our event would be ending but she would stop in… My prayers began.

Still feeling good about our progress and his responses we took a taxi to…..  Where????….  The White House!!!! Just Beautiful!We were welcomed by Joshua DuBois’ assistant who rushed over to start the meeting for Joshua because he was tied up in a meeting.  Again,
told that we were all to be thanked and recognized for our work.  We were told that amongst the top organizations, we were up there!!!  WOW!  The administration said this!!!  Great meeting and Joshua came in pretty quick to
meet with us.  He opened his door to our work and is willing to support our efforts by relaying the messages to his boss!!!!!!!!!!!!!~  It doesn’t get any better than that!!!  Oh no!  Now its time to go back to the capital for our exhibition.  As the exhibition was getting the finishing touches I sat down and gathered my thoughts to chair the meeting.  I didn’t feel it until
now!!!  We had a great experience and everything was going great… Spencer was there and I recognized him and Susan Davis as mentioned.  I noticed he hung around a bit… Then Susan Davis walks in and is greeted and thanked. She was so impressed with our exhibition that she asked for the room to be used longer so that the congressional caucus members could come see it after their caucus ended.  Long story short, Susan brought everyone in with us including Pelosi and Waxman!!! About 20-30 of them came in and we shared our stories with them!!!  Gotta go for now…..

Some of the most moving stories came from Orlando. Like Wanda’s.

Wanda has taken out a second mortgage on her home to try to pay down the hospital debt from her husband’s heart surgery. She has maxed out all of their credit cards. She tells me that if anyone in her family were to get sick, she doesn’t know what they would do, because they can’t afford the deductibles anymore.

Last week, the Senate Finance Committee passed their version of health reform, and many of us felt a little torn. We’ve been fighting for so long, and on the one hand, this felt like some kind of progress. So much attention has been focused on the political maneuvering among and around the senate finance committee—surely passing through a bill there with bipartisan support meant something!

And yet, we know that it is still not enough, because the affordability standards in the Senate Finance Committee’s bill don’t quite do the job. (If you want to get more into the details here, check out PICO and Community Catalyst’s report)

Over the coming days and weeks, we’ll be hearing news and speculation on the latest rounds of negotiations in the Senate as they try to reconcile the Senate Finance Committee’s bill with the Health Committee’s bill and then as the bill goes to vote on the Senate floor.  There is still a lot of room, during this time, to make sure this reform does its job– to make sure that Wanda’s story and the thousands like it are heard and understood and never happen again.

As Congress gets deeper and deeper into its negotiations, we will most likely continue to feel torn. We, as a country, inch closer to passing reform but we, as individuals and families, can feel less and less relevant to the debate.  By telling our stories, we reinsert ourselves into these decisions, and we claim our place at the center of the debate.

Which is why tomorrow, we’ll be bringing all of our stories to Capitol Hill. A thousand photographs and testimonies will be set up in the Capitol to remind our Senators and Representatives that this reform has to be strong enough to create meaningful change for all of us. We have to keep the pressure on. We have to keep telling our stories. In doing this, we will write and rewrite our own story of this country.

At four different events in Louisiana—New Orleans, New Roads, New Iberia, and Baton Rouge– people like Glenda spoke about what we’ve now heard all across the country as common experiences and shared values.

View Glenda’s message to Congress from Baton Rouge, LA:

In Louisiana, the issue spreads deeply into the recesses of rural and urban life. The economic recession and the state’s continuous struggle to recover from Katrina and Gustav have left Louisiana residents particularly vulnerable to the skyrocketing costs of health insurance.

Between 2008 and 2009, as the unemployment rate increased, over 24,300 residents joined the ranks of the uninsured.

Those who have kept their jobs have also felt the pinch of rising costs; over the past ten years, employees’ contributions for health insurance premiums in Louisiana have increased 44% for single people and 36% for families. Meanwhile, household income has only increased by 10%.

Whether employed or unemployed, insured or uninsured, in Louisiana, the convergence of economic recession, natural disaster, and rising costs of health insurance have put a tremendous strain on families.

Over 200 people from congregations all over New Orleans came together to share their struggle and their hope for health reform.  As they added their photographs and testimonies to the exhibit, they celebrated the pilgrimage of hundreds of stories to Washington, D.C.

Candace, a young diabetic woman stepped forward to have her photograph taken and add her story to the exhibit.  Candace lost her own mother to diabetes just a few months ago.  Without insurance, her mother was unable to afford the treatment and disease management she needed.  Candace says that her mother wouldn’t go to the doctor until Candace found her unconscious in their house.

In a state where more than one in three people (36.2 percent) went without health insurance between 2007 and 2008, there are stories like Candace’s everywhere. Even among those who do have health insurance, the costs are often prohibitive: over 17% of adults in Louisiana reported not seeing the doctor because of costs, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund.

Now, just as her mother avoided seeking care because she couldn’t afford it, Candace finds herself unable to afford the insurance she needs to manage her diabetes. But she, like hundreds of others in New Orleans, has come ready for a fight.

Watch some of the video from last night’s event. There is a feeling of excitement and celebration that our stories are on their way to the capital, and there is a deep commitment to the struggle to make health care affordable and accessible to all people.

The traveling exhibit filled a sunny room in Immanuel Lutheran Church, a couple blocks away from the line dividing Kansas and Missouri, and smack in the middle of a part of the country that has become a battleground in the fight for health reform.

Dave, a self- identified moderate Republican from Kansas, hadn’t ever been a part of Communities Creating Opportunity (CCO), but found himself drawn to PICO’s work after seeing the stark contrast between two health care meetings he’d gone to this past August.  The first, a town hall, featured people determined to defeat health reform by any means necessary. The overt political agendas of the town hall didn’t resonate with Dave. Seeking to engage in a conversation that reflected the human element of the health care crisis, he attended an action with CCO.  “If those people at the town hall could have heard the testimonies at that action,” Dave told me.  He indicated the hundreds of stories in the exhibit. “If they could hear these stories, I think they would see things a little differently.”

If you watch the video below, you’ll see a short snippet of Dave’s reactions to the exhibit, and you’ll sense the energy and excitement he gets both from having the opportunity to read the stories of people across the country who care about health reform and from having the opportunity to add his own.

As the Senate Finance Committee delves deeper and deeper into the nuts and bolts of reform legislation, it’s easy to lose track of what this legislation means to millions of American families.  It’s easy to feel like our voices are no longer a part of the debate.  What this exhibit—and pretty soon our website—help to do is continue to ground the debate in the day-to-day experiences of Americans who care deeply about health reform.  It helps us to stay connected to our own stories and to those of our fellow Americans who have taken a stand for quality, affordable health coverage for all.

At a scenic overlook, a K-State student welcomes us to Kansas:

Manhattan! … Kansas

Tomorrow the exhibit will be hosted at Immanuel Lutheran Church (1700 Westport Road) in Kansas City, Missouri from 11:30 to 4:00.

Welcome to Colorado

And here are some snapshots from the exhibit at Regis University in Denver.

Denver, Colorado

Last night, one of MOP’s youth leaders sat frowning at the card that asked her to explain why she cared about health care.  “I’m stuck,” she said, “I just have too much to write, and I don’t think it’ll all fit.”  She described family and friends that don’t have health care.  She spoke passionately about her belief that this was a matter of equality, that the broken system was a source of great injustice.

Pundits and politicians have often referred to young adults as the “young invincibles,” writing them out of the health reform debate with the suggestion that they choose not to have insurance because they are generally healthier and less in touch with the suffering of being uninsured than the older population.

But young people between the ages of 19 and 24 represent the highest percentage of uninsured individuals– nearly 1/3 are without health insurance.  When President Barack Obama addressed a rally at University of Maryland in September, he said that nearly half of uninsured young people under the age of thirty have trouble paying their medical bills, and nearly forty percent are in debt because of them.  Earlier in the year, the Commonwealth Fund found that sixty percent of adults under the age of thirty who had gone without health coverage did so because they felt they couldn’t afford it– not because they thought they didn’t need it.

As the exhibit has grown and moved across the west coast, youth from all over have stepped forward to tell their stories and to read the stories of others.  As I write this, students from Regis University in Denver mill around the exhibit in their library.  Two nursing students, Danielle and Carrie, tell me that they talk about health reform in their classes, and that the students are often divided about the politics around reform.  What they want to hear more of, they say, is about how the crisis affects real people and how we can change our mindsets to think about health care as a human right as opposed to a privilege.

Carrie motions to the library around her and points out that the government has determined certain services to be fundamental priorities.  ”And that’s great, that’s wonderful… But why not health?”  she asks.

Watch Danielle and Carrie’s interview:

Nursing Students at Regis

Denver is disproportionately affected by the health care crisis;  we have the numbers to prove it.  But today and tomorrow we’ll be gathering the stories that speak the real truth of a broken health care system in Colorado and nationally.  We’ll be capturing stories of people who suffer and people who have to watch their families suffer.  We’ll be documenting the strength of Denver’s people of faith who call for meaningful reform that makes coverage accessible and affordable for themselves, their families, and their communities.

We have two events planned in Denver over the next two days.  This evening, MOP Denver is hosting a photo shoot at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church from 4:00 to 9:00.

Tomorrow, the exhibit will be set up at Dayton Memorial Library at Regis University from 8:00 am to 4:00.

Here’s today’s story.  Shezwae lost her job and her health benefits when her organization was forced to make budget cuts.  With a pre-existing heart condition, Shezwae has been unable to afford private health insurance.

Shezwae

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13390275