Yesterday, Yvonne Richardson, an 1199 SEIU Retiree, President of the West Palm Beach Chapter and SEIU Retiree Advisory Council Member, participated in a Roundtable on Reforming Medicare hosted by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the Sunrise Senior Center in Sunrise, Florida. Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined Congresswoman Schultz and heard from a panel of 15 invited guests that work with Seniors in a variety of capacities.
While many of the panelists discussed what they liked about the current legisliation, Yvonne took a more personal approach with her testimony. She explained her long history of working in the healthcare field and how she knew things had changed when they stopped referring to people as patients and started to refer to them as "clients." She told the story of her Mom's recent surgery which brought the bad news of a malignant tumor and how 24 hours after surgery somebody was in her Mom's room asking how their Humana copayment was going to be made.
Yvonne noted that she had been talking to a lot of seniors who were unable to be at the roundtable to share their own story. As she spoke both for herself and those seniors, she proclaimed that the scare tactics of big insurance were not going to work this time.
