Contact: Wendy McDowell, NCC, 212-870-2227
NCC 12/11/96 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
| Press Release Contact: Wendy McDowell, NCC, 212-870-2227 NCC 12/11/96 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | |
NCC HEALTH CONFERENCE ASKS FOR UNIVERSAL COVERAGE, HMO ACCOUNTABILITY
NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 9 ---- Religious and moral leaders must insist on a vision of universal access to equitable health care. That message rang loud and clear at a National Council of Churches (NCC) conference Ethical Alternatives in Health Care In the Context of Corporatization, held here Dec. 9.
"We must recenter our gaze, our scholarship, our resources to this ordinary drama" of the uninsured, declared Dr. Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman, a Jewish ethicist and registered nurse from San Francisco, who spoke at midday but encapsulated the entire day of lively discussion among over 50 community leaders. The conference was sponsored by Resources for the Civic Conversation, an interreligious project of the NCC, and supported by grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Booth Ferris Foundation. "We need to reopen the debate about universal access. All Americans should have secure health coverage. It is sinful not to have it." Citing the Bible's mandate to share, Dr. Zoloth-Dorfman said, "we must see the stranger and the poor as kin. Only by encountering the most vulnerable do we encounter God." She said churches need to be empowered so the discourse around this issue can be born out of faith communities. "If our response to the 'get real' answer (about health care) was always 'get just,' . . . we would keep faith and bear witness."
James Tallon, President of the United Hospital Fund, New York City, keynoted the morning session and described the "profound change in financing health services" that has occurred in the past three years. "The 'purchaser revolution' of the early 1990s took a system that was hospital and doctor-driven and literally turned it on its head," he explained. The new, for-profit, insurance provider-driven system "destroys relationships" between doctor and patient, and undermines community-based care, he said. "Whereas in the old system, a sick person was seen as a source of revenue, in the new system, a sick person is viewed as a generator of costs."
Respondent Quentin Young, M.D., President-Elect, American Public Health Association, who practices in Chicago, used even stronger langage than did Mr. Tallon, calling the new system "a uniquely American craziness" that puts 100,000 more people per month into the uninsured pool while CEOs of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and Insurance Companies make millions of dollars. "This makes the robber barons of the last century look like pussycats," Dr. Young said. He encouraged policymakers and leaders not to go back to the "bad old days" where organized medicine called the shots, but to call for justice for the American people so that businesses are held accountable for their actions and all lives are "covered."
Allan Rosenfield, M.D., Dean, School of Public Health, Columbia University, NYC, encouraged religious leaders to push for health care as a human right, not a privilege. In spite of the missed golden opportunity during the Clinton Administration's first term, Dr. Rosenfield said he is optimistic the country can be moved to a national system of health care.
Community leaders kept coming back to the question of how to organize and educate people locally. "We must work at how to play this out on the ground level," said Sheila L. Thorne, Healthcare Communication Specialist who lives in the Bronx. "We as community people are worn out on workshops and seminars," said the Rev. Barbara Evans of the Health and Wholeness Ministry of Grace Baptist Church, Mt. Vernon, NY and a nurse practitioner. "We need to empower people with knowledge."
An afternoon panel provided model solutions from specific communities. Richard Butcher, M.D., President of the Summit Health Coalition, a recently formed network of African American national, state and community organizations working to ensure that health care reform benefits vulnerable, underserved populations, said "the church is important as a site of consumer education and a place to measure the quality of care people are receiving."
Conference participants also spent time seeking to formulate ethical principles with respect to health care systems and to suggest models that would implement those principles. One group discussed the ethical principle "I am my brother's keeper." Models discussed included public health service programs, community-based networks of doctors, and locally controlled and financed HMOs.
David Jones, President of the Community Service Society described a set of factors that could lead to "calamity" for New York City's health system. Among these are a lack of primary care physicians in poor neighborhoods, the "mindless drive" to privatize city hospitals and the rush to move one million Medicaid recipients to managed care, he said. "There are also some solutions," Jones offered, including a reformed HMO system that educates people and is accountable to them, providing incentives for primary care doctors in underserved neighborhoods and mandating that the city and state provide doctors for those areas, and fighting to save the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation.
Elena Padilla, M.D., Scholar-in-residence, St. Barnabas Hospital, New York City, also pressed the importance of public hospitals. Paul Simms, Former Deputy Director of Health, San Diego and Consultant to Drew University, Los Angeles, described the model he developed in San Diego wherein his department "set up a performance standard that our mothers would want" and strategically created a system that responded to "values driven by patients." His government department was there at the entry and exit points of health care to call for accountability, and thereby achieved increased patient survival rates.
The Rev. Charles Rawlings, Director of Resources for the Civic Conversation, NCC and the conference organizer, agreed that the message from the conference needs to get to people in the pews. "People need to know what decisions are being made involving billions of dollars without their participation," he said. "This private deciding about public goods is not only a threat to equity but a threat to democracy." Rev. Rawlings said he hoped the day's discussion was a model of "democracy and negotiating how to establish equity for all-not a bad thing to do either during the celebration of Hannakah or during the Advent preparations for Christmas."
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