Curing Sicko

Fort Wayne resident Maria Parra doesn’t have health insurance. Even though she graduated from IU with a Masters in Business Administration, the 51-year-old information technology contractor has high blood pressure and cannot afford to pay $500 a month for insurance.\nParra and the other 47 million uninsured people in the U.S. are the reason that Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan and several other local organizations have taken to the road as part of the HealthCare Now! Sicko National Road Show bus tour. As part of the group’s goal to encourage legislators to co-sponsor House Resolution 676, a bill designed to reform health care in the U.S., the bus tour stopped in Bloomington on Wednesday for a rally outside the Monroe County Courthouse.\nIf passed, the bill would set up a single-payer health care system, which would create a national health care plan, said Rob Stone, director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan. The bill was first introduced in 2001 by Congressman John Conyers, D-Mich.\nTo gather support for H.R. 676, tour members have been screening Michael Moore’s movie, “Sicko,” for free at rallies. \nA sparse crowd turned up in front of the courthouse to show support for the idea of improved health care, while protesters waved signs that read “Healthcare not Warfare” on the corner of Kirkwood Avenue and Walnut Street.\nIn a brief speech at the event, Stone, who is also an emergency room physician at Bloomington Hospital, said the health care system in the U.S. is “collapsing.”\n“I see people all the time who’ve lost health insurance for one reason or another but won’t go to the doctor because they are afraid of the bill,” Stone said. “They wait a few days, and when they come to the ER, they need surgery now instead of a cast. We’re trying to get people to say we can do something about this, it’s still a democracy.”\nDonna Smith, who Moore featured in his film and travels with the road show, talked to supporters about the troubles she and millions of other Americans faced because of the current health care system. \n“We always had health insurance, but when we got sick, it still took us out financially,” Smith said.\nMoore’s film showed Smith and her husband moving into their daughter’s house after being bankrupted by medical bills when both she and her husband fell ill.\n“I was always taught to to fight as part of the middle-class ethic, but at some point, you’ve given it all you have and when you go down, you take down the credit union and your loans and all the people that have been nice to you,” she said. “You take people and the economy with you. The cycle gets deeper and deeper and deeper.”\nIn between speakers, the band Kiwi, Ude and the Oral Minority provided a soundtrack of mostly The Beatles and Elton John songs with politically conscious altered lyrics. At one juncture, “All You Need Is Love” became the Republican admonishment, “All You Need is Oil.”\nSo far H.R. 676 has 86 cosponsors in Congress, but Olivia Boykins, special assistant to Conyers, said the goal of the tour was to get 100 before the journey concludes.\n“The more cosponsors we have, the more attention the bill gets on the House floor,” she said.\nCynthia Bretheim, a rally attendee, said she didn’t have health insurance and that she thinks “health care for all is the most important thing for our democracy.”\n“The hidden costs of health care are staggering,” she said.