wfn.org | NCCCUSA Addresses Health Care, Coverage

[CAROL_FOUKE.parti@ecunet.org]

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
U.S.A.
Contact: Wendy McDowell, NCC, 212-870-2227
Internet: c/o carol_fouke.parti@ecunet.org

NCC12/11/96                  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, National 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" when 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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