Health Care Rally Protests Lack Of Support
By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, Courant Staff Writer
At a rally of medical students, doctors and social activists near the steps of the state Capitol in Hartford on Sunday, the frustrated refrain was: political leaders have abandoned the poorest working-class families by failing to support universal health care.
In the past two decades, said Jean Rexford, a human rights activist, the conservative political right has successfully lobbied Democratic and Republican politicians to essentially gut health care funding for the poor.
And, she added, the state's political climate has shifted so far to the conservative right, even today with a Democrat-controlled General Assembly, that health becomes a victim - especially for underprivileged children and pregnant women.
Dr. John R. Battista, president of the Connecticut Coalition for Universal Health Care, said the state's health care system is discouraging its poorest residents from seeking care and few political leaders are doing anything to help them.
Battista ticked off figures about the state:
Those lacking basic health insurance include 29 percent of non-elderly residents making substantially less than the federal poverty guidelines - $12,120 for a household of two people - as well as 24 percent of non-elderly Hispanics and 17 percent of non-elderly blacks.
Health care costs are the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcies.
And, 25 percent of state residents are locked into jobs they want to escape, simply because they would lose health care benefits if they changed employment.
Sunday's rally attracted 50 to 60 people and was organized by the American Medical Student Association, which has 40,000 members nationwide and about 300 in Connecticut, mostly from Yale and the University of Connecticut's medical schools.
Lauren Oshman, the association's national president and a senior medical student at Baylor University, said medical students are more active in supporting universal health care than doctors and nurses. Doctors are generally more concerned with their rising medical malpractice insurance costs, she said.
In Hartford, said Dr. Bruce Gould, director of the Burgdorf Fleet Health Center, if conditions get worse, "people will be dying in the streets." Communicable diseases like AIDS will intensify in the general population, he said.
The center handles 30,000 to 40,000 office visits a year at its clinic on Coventry Street in the city's North End. Gould said staff members have to scrounge to get the money and the medicine to treat these patients' critical illnesses.
Gould said he is troubled by politicians who insist the working poor exploit government funding for health care by overusing services or medications; or that cutting funding for preventive medicine is a sound way to control state or federal budgets.
In fact, he explained, many working poor are reluctant to use the health care system because they need what money they would spend on it for essentials like food and rent.
And, Gould added, if state and federal politicians ensure more funding is available for preventive medicine for the poor, millions of dollars can be saved in public subsidies for hospital emergency room visits and in worker productivity.
"Any way you look at it, either the saving the dollar way, or on the humanistic side of it," Gould said, "a healthy population is a productive population."
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