This weekend, Iowa saw a different kind of town hall forum.
At the Macbride hall, on the University of Iowa campus, dozens of signed scrubs were displayed with messages of support for health insurance reform--and painful stories of hardship because of our current health care system.
Signed by health care providers from the various University of Iowa hospitals and clinics, these messages are from people on the front lines: people who deal with sick patients and their families every day. Patients who, under our current system, do not get better, but worse.
We've told you the statistics: 310,000 are uninsured today in Iowa, and another 70 lose insurance every day. But with numbers so big, it's easy to forget that each of those 70, each of those 310,000, is a person with a story just like ours.
Our brave medical providers do not forget, because they are out there every day dealing with the reality of people with inadequate coverage, who have put off their health care until it is too little too late. There's a difference between reading the statistic, "The average family premium will rise from $12,190 to $20,801 by 2019 in Iowa without reform," and treating a family who had to choose between dinner, and health care.
In an interview with ABC, SEIU Local 199 president Cathy Glasson said this:
"We're just saying on behalf of all the people who signed these scrubs that we want change, that the status quo for our patients that we see every day is not working. And we're going to rely on our congressmen from Iowa to go back to Washington DC and get something done so that people from Iowa have access to quality, affordable health care."
Cathy went on to emphasize that the providers wanted the focus to be on the human cost of our broken health care system:
"It's almost like the providers of care are really begging for a change, because they know how badly change is needed in the broken health care system we have now.....This is about health care providers that take care of human beings every day. This is about human lives. People need to share their thoughts, but they can't forget that there's human beings here, and lives at stake, and our point today is to make sure they hear from the people that provide care for those folks."
Watch our footage of Cathy's interview here:
Every Patient Matters: Learn more about the campaign to sign scrubs here.
