By Kevin O’Connor
STAFF WRITER (TA)

Richard Davis didn’t want knee replacement surgery four days after Christmas. But having already paid $2,700 of his $3,000 annual health insurance deductible, the 60-year-old Vermonter didn’t want a bigger bill with the start of this new year.

"Do I pay $300 now or $3,000 later?" the Guilford man said just before his operation. "I had emergency back surgery in December 2001 and complications in January 2002 and ended up paying the deductible twice within a month, in addition to the premiums."

The only redeeming thing to come out of his ordeal: a personal story for this week’s Statehouse public hearing on health care reform.

Davis, a registered nurse and executive director of the Vermont Citizens Campaign for Health, is one of several grass-roots organizers getting people to testify Tuesday night before a joint House and Senate committee.

For the average Vermonter, doing so means driving as many as three cold, dark hours to Montpelier, then sitting before media microphones to reveal the most private of medical and economic hardships.

"We can’t get some of the testimony we’d like to because people don’t want others to know how bad off they are," Davis says. "Why would anyone want to tell someone how horrible their life is? It’s a humiliating experience."

Even so, legislative organizers anticipate so many will attend the 6 to 9 p.m. hearing that they’ve booked the House chamber, will start a signup list at 5:30 p.m. and will limit individual testimony to two minutes.

Davis understands the drill – members of his Windham County-based group have done this before. When the Legislature was creating the state’s Catamount health insurance plan in 2006, Guilford poet Verandah Porche, 64, not only attended a similar hearing but also wrote and read a poem.

"My body’s coverage is skin," it concluded. "Thick or thin, my only coverage is skin."

Porche bemoans the "bread and circus" aspect of such events.

"Everybody needs to be heart-warmed or titillated."

But she also believes in telling the truth.

"Part of the Vermont brand is doing without, and one form of flamboyance is tightening your belt in public. It’s a huge shift to come out and say, ‘I’m breaking from that story, I’ve got this one instead.’"

 

‘Bittersweet and greed’

Porche has chronicled several people’s plights on the campaign’s Web site, www.universalhealthvt.org. There, Brattleboro logger Duane Young, in his 40s, explains how a helmet used to be his only coverage – and something that saved his life.

"You know it’s a lot easier to thin a forest than fix the system," Young is quoted as telling Porche. "It’s all wrapped up in, like, kudzu, grapevine, bittersweet and greed."

Guilford dairy farmer Phil Cutting, in his 50s, told the poet how he paid at least $400 a month for insurance but found a doctor’s visit for chest pains still left him owing about $2,000.

"Said it was probably gas," Cutting is quoted on the Web site. "Being a farmer, you don’t have to worry about robbers. No one’s going to come after your money."

With the passage of Catamount – part of the state’s new Green Mountain Care brand of government services – Porche and about 12,000 formerly uninsured Vermonters now have coverage. But the Legislature didn’t change anything for residents who are underinsured or paying high premiums and deductibles, so advocates are pushing for a second round of reform.

The Burlington-based Vermont Workers’ Center launched its Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign after finding that coverage costs were trumping its longtime fight for livable wages.

"We realized we couldn’t advance our cause without getting a real solution on health care," director James Haslam says. "It has an enormous impact on every level, from state and school budgets all the way down to family budgets."

The center has held public forums in 10 of Vermont’s 14 counties (the next will take place today from 3 to 5 p.m. at Vergennes’ Bixby Memorial Library). Advocates are lining up rides for Tuesday so people from those events can speak out to the state.

"We’ve had folks come out with the most personal, powerful, courageous stories," Haslam says. "People who have gotten sick, people with high medical bills, people who have lost a loved one, small-business people who have had to lay off people because they can’t afford health care – the list goes on and on."

 

Forgoing care

The center, surveying more than 1,000 residents for its recent report "Voices of the Vermont Healthcare Crisis," found that nearly a third of the state’s population is underinsured, with six in 10 of those polled saying they had refrained from seeking care because they couldn’t afford it.

Jim Hyde, a 61-year-old Fair Haven truck driver, used to have a "halfway decent" health plan with a $5,000 deductible. When his premium price "went sky high," he had to raise his deductible to $10,000 – leaving him shortly after with a $6,000 hospital bill.

Hyde let the center tell his story in its recent report, but he’s not planning on attending Tuesday’s hearing. Currently disabled after a work injury, he’ll let others spread the message.

"We the people want affordable health care," Hyde says. "The Legislature could do something more – and faster."

Dr. Deborah Richter concurs. A family practitioner in the small Lamoille County town of Cambridge, she’s founder of Vermont Health Care for All, a group seeking publicly funded coverage, and co-author of the recent book "Gridlock: The Unhealthy Politics of Health Care in Vermont."

Many state lawmakers and laymen hope Congress will agree on historic national health-care reform. But although that may aid Americans without options like Catamount, Richter will testify that it won’t necessarily help Vermont.

"What is happening in Washington will not address the cost of health care," she says. "The problem is getting worse and worse, and I see it every day. The Legislature has no choice but to do something."

 

‘The pressure is on’

But grass-roots groups are conflicted on whether, after being heard, anything will actually happen.

"It’s important to have this hearing, but on the other hand, I think the leadership is doing this as an appeasement gesture," Davis says. "Legislators keep telling us they need to hear these stories, but they’ve heard them all before."

Lawmakers interviewed last week promised they would consider several reform proposals, although they acknowledged Gov. James Douglas didn’t share their interest.

Advocates promise they’ll push for more than talk. They point to two identical bills calling for a single-payer system, S.88 and H.100.

"What we really want is a bill to go through committee for a vote," Davis says. "We want legislators to know the pressure is on."

To demonstrate, the Vermont Workers’ Center welcomed the House and Senate back to Montpelier last week with some 4,000 postcards from constituents.

"We’re working on the shoulders of people who have been struggling decades and decades for health care," Haslam says. "It’s not up to any one person to tell their story. Our challenge is to show elected officials that the vast majority of people are ready for change."