South Thomaston man arrested at Senate session
By Abigail Curtis
Bangor Daily News
May 16, 2009
A Maine health care activist was arrested, shackled and put in leg irons Tuesday in Washington for disrupting a U.S. Senate Finance Committee round-table discussion on health care reform.
Jerry Call, 64, of South Thomaston, co-founder of the group Midcoast Health Care Reform, spent 30 hours in a Washington, D.C., jail after he stood up at the round table and said 60 percent of the nation’s citizens want a single-payer system.
“Why do you insist on spending more money, when the single payer would give it to us at the price we’re spending now? Sixty percent! Why not 60 percent of the people in front of you representing single payer?” Call said before a Capitol police officer pulled him out of the hearing room. “This is a sham! All you’ve got is special interests groups up there.”
In response to Call’s words, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who is chairman of the committee, said the hearing would take a break “until the police can restore order.” He then asked for the police to “please come more expeditiously,” according to a C-SPAN video of the event.
Call was representing the national group Physicians for a National Health Program. He and four other single-payer advocates were arrested outside the hearing room, he sa
id in a telephone interview Wednesday night.
“It needed to be said,” he said of his comments. “I wouldn’t even be involved in this except for the fact that polls show that over 60 percent of Americans want a single-payer system.”
At the start of this week’s round table, more than a dozen nurses stood in silent protest and turned their backs on Finance Committee Chairman Baucus as he spoke. They had signs attached to the backs of their shirts supporting single-payer or government-run health care and protesting industry influence.
Baucus did not incorporate any advocates of a single-payer health care system in this series of hearings.
On May 5, eight doctors, lawyers and activists were arrested after they disrupted the opening comments of the hearing to ask why single-payer experts were being excluded from the proceedings, according to Physicians for a National Health Program.
“This is totally new for me,” Call said. “If I hadn’t been so incensed by [Baucus’] attitude and dismissiveness, I wouldn’t have come to Washington.” A spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee said Thursday that Baucus has been working on health care reform for a year and a half.
“Senator Baucus wants to achieve quality, affordable health care for all Americans,” Erin Shields said. “And he wants to make sure that all Americans who20like the coverage they have now can keep it. For that reason, he wants to build on the employer-based health insurance system we have today.”
She said that health care advocates who were not allowed to testify at the round table were invited to submit statements for the record, and that the senator had offered to meet with anyone in his office. That offer didn’t sit well with people like Call, who said that his message about single-payer health care was important enough to be said in public — not behind closed doors.
“He’s just continuously said that he’d refuse to let us take part, and refuse to let single payer be part of the discussion,” he said of Baucus.
Call said that he did not see Sen. Olympia Snowe, who also sits on the Finance Committee.
A representative of Snowe’s office, Julia Wanczo, said the senator has attended the round tables and asked questions, but that she has not been involved in choosing the witness list.
“I know that she has been a longtime advocate for overhauling the [health care] system,” Wanczo said. “At this point, she hasn’t taken anything off the table. She’s exploring all viable options.” Call said that he originally got involved with health care reform several years ago after he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.
“Going into the operation, I said that
if I lived through it, I’d find a way to pay back society for my good fortune,” he said. “When I heard about single payer, I knew what I’d have to do. We already spend twice as much as any other industrialized nation [on health care] and the outcomes are worse.”
In Maine, Call has organized a single-payer health care rally planned for May 30 in Augusta.
Mark Almberg, communications director for the 16,000-physician-strong advocacy group with which Call is affiliated, said that the activists felt compelled to speak out at the roundtable because they had sent “literally thousands” of e-mail messages, phone calls and faxes to Baucus but that no representative of the single-payer viewpoint was included.
“I think it was in the best traditions of civil disobedience in the United States,” Almberg said. The Associated Press contributed to this report.