Lucy Gellman Photo
Bhattacharya links hands with colleagues.
The next generation of doctors, nurses and public health experts took a break from clinical rounds and classes at noon Monday in the hope that their patients, many of whom rely on the Affordable Care Act, will be able to afford reliable healthcare going forward.
Sporting homemade signs that read “Universal Health Care is a Universal Right,” “I stand with the 30,000,000,” and “Protect our patients,” around 100 students congregated on Cedar Street, joining a nationwide effort led by Protect Our Patients, a national coalition of present and future health care professionals fighting efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”).
Congress plans to begin holding committee hearings on repeal on Tuesday. President Donald Trump has called for repeal, as has the Republican leadership of the House adn Senate. They argue that premiums have risen too high under Obamacare and that the prgram has failed to live up to its promises.
In advance of the repeal deliberations, Protect Our Patients organized a national day“Do No Harm Action” to take place between noon and 1 p.m. across the country. As of Monday at noon, the Yale School of Medicine was one of 46 institutions participating.
Meizlish.
Starting in a crowd outside the 333 Cedar St. medical school building, students — joined by a few of their professors and practicing Yale-New Haven Hospital (Y‑NHH) physicians — gathered to listen to representatives of the Yale Healthcare Coalition (YHC), a student group that was formed in late November last year after the election of President Donald Trump. Squeezing together by the buildings’s entrance and stone steps, students cheered as fourth-year medical student Priscilla Wang took the megaphone, and gave an impassioned appeal for keeping the ACA.
“We want to send Congress a clear message — do not repeal!” yelled Wang, a founding member of YHC who is applying to residencies in internal medicine, and watched her own grandparents move back to Taiwan when the cost of healthcare in the U.S. became untenable. “It would mean an attack on our patients. We are standing here to say: Do no harm. And [that] all of us are watching.”
“All of us are here as individuals, but it is equally important, now more than ever, that our institutions speak out,” added MD-MBA student Eamon Duffy, referencing a hope that the Medical School will issue an institutional statement in favor of the Affordable Care Act this week.
Students then stretched out on both sides of Cedar Street, linking hands as they shouted “Protect our patients!” and “Do no harm!” in unison. A continuous chain of bodies stretched over the better part of the street.
For students like Dipankan Bhattacharya, a sixth-year MD-PhD candidate pursing pediatrics, the rally was as personal as it was professional. He immigrated from India with his parents 16 years ago. He has since watched his mom receive life-saving healthcare through the Affordable Care Act, which made allowances for her preexisting condition. If the ACA is repealed, along its government guarantees that insurance will cover preexisting conditions he said, he will fear for her life.
“There are so many things I want to be protesting right now,” he said. “As an immigrant, and as a doctor. It’s very scary to think about how things are going to be going forward.”
He added that many of the patients he sees at Yale-New Haven and the Haven Free Clinic (where he volunteers) are covered by the ACA. “This would be the end for them,” he said.
Hutchins.
First-year public-health management student Shermaine Hutchins, a U.S. Army veteran from Daytona Beach, Florida, said he gets health insurance through Yale. But he’s worried about his wife and two young kids, to whom those benefits don’t extend. Right now, they’re covered the ACA. But if that disappears, he said, the family won’t be able to afford another form of insurance, he said.
“Until the ACA, I or my family never had insurance, because it was like, you could have insurance, or you could pay rent,” he said. “Some of the bureaucrats in Washington fail to realize that.”
Andi Shahu and others.
Responding to those “bureaucrats” — and the 51 legislators still in favor of repealing the ACA with no viable replacement in place — students said they are hoping that administrators and managers will come forward to make an official statement against the possible repeal, following in the steps of hospitals like Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
In a post-protest debrief in the school’s library, Yale Health Coalition member and medical student Matt Meizlish urged colleagues to get involved. He, Wang, and other YHC leaders laid out a multi-step plan: calling Republican state representatives who may still vote in favor of the ACA (those states include Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Kentucky); sharing personal stories of the ACA’s success with friends, family, colleagues, and legislators; signing a #ProtectOurPatients petition; and trying to push to Medical School to take a public stance on the importance of maintaining and improving the ACA, instead of replacing it.
As of Monday afternoon, the Medical School had not replied to a request for comment.