Melinda Tuhus Photo
While a reform bill flounders in Washington D.C., a leading Connecticut health reformer said activists at home have a stake in reviving it.
The reformer, Frances Padilla, warned Thursday night that federal failure could spell trouble for Sustinet, the public state health care plan.
Padilla (pictured getting her mic adjusted for a 21st Century Conversations taping at North Haven TV) is acting president of the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut. The group organized support over several years for a public state health care plan called SustiNet, which was passed by the General Assembly and withstood a gubernatorial veto in 2009. Read about the legislation here.
“We’re closer than we’ve ever been to national health care reform, and we have to urge Congress to finish the job they started,” Padilla said before the show. “We need federal reform to bring SustiNet into reality, and when we have SustiNet in Connecticut as well, we will have comprehensive, well-thought through improvements to the health care system – coverage, cost relief and quality of care.”
The slogan of Thursday night’s TV show on federal health care reform could have been “It’s not too late!”
The guest panelists on N’Zinga Shani’s One World show, entitled “Affordable Health Care — A Human Right.”, all touched on that theme. They insisted that meaningful federal health care reform can and must be accomplished this year.
In addition to Padilla, panelists (left to right) included the Rev. Sara Lamar-Sterling, pastor of First & Summerfield United Methodist Church, Teresa Younger, executive director of the state’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, and Brad Plebani, deputy director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, Inc., based in Willimantic.
Sustinet was designed to dovetail with federal action, and will not work as well without it, Padilla said.
“Remember when SustiNet was first designed,” she said, “there was really no federal reform on the horizon, but there was a role for the federal government. SustiNet assumes that in order to be able to cover people between three and four times poverty, there’ll be a need for subsidies and we’ll need the federal government to give Connecticut some waivers and make it possible. And in addition, because [the federal House and Senate versions] have so many of the delivery system reforms – the medical home, health information technology and quality improvements that are also part of the SustiNet design, we’ll be looking for fed funding for pilot projects to be able to implement those. We’ve got an implementation framework. We’ve got a board that’s putting together all of the pieces so we can do it. But we do need the federal government as a partner, so we need Congress to act.”
SustiNet doesn’t cost the state anything over the next 18 months as its board of directors develops the framework for a state health care system, which includes a type of public option. It considers costs and quality as well as access.
Padilla concluded, “Federal reform would make it possible for everyone in Connecticut to have affordable coverage that is independent of whether they have pre-existing conditions; reforms in the House and Senate bills would provide improvements to the system within the first couple years; make premiums more affordable; make out of pocket costs more affordable; they would make it possible to get preventive diagnostic and screening to services to people, especially to women.”
Women Could Benefit
Another theme that emerged from Thursday’s program was that women in particular will benefit from health care reform.
Younger noted that more women than men serve as caregivers, and are disproportionately the ones who quit their jobs to care for loved ones, often sacrificing their own health insurance. Lamar-Sterling said her church is advocating for full reproductive health care for women in any final legislation, “including abortion” (which is not the case now).
And since older women outnumber older men, women would especially benefit from improvements in Medicare, which Plebani said are included in the federal bills.