Advocates Are Back With Real Health Care Stories
Douglas is among thousands of people now telling their stories on videos, ads and Web sites on both sides of the health care debate.
He said he was drawn into political advocacy after neighbors in Harpswell, Maine, raised $3,000 toward his hospital bills with a church dinner and collection cans in stores.
Douglas said he may not understand the intricacies of President Barack Obamas top domestic priority, but he knows he wants affordable health care for everyone, so nobody has to beg.
“People arent standing up to be counted,” Douglas said, explaining why he allowed his name to be used in a political YouTube video. “I just hope I can help somebody else.”
The “Begging for Change” video, posted on YouTube by Maines Service Employees union, depicts fundraising efforts on behalf of Douglas and other people with crushing medical bills. It includes shots of a yard-sale sign with photos of a sick baby on it, and a poster for a fundraising dinner that reads, “You Gotta Eat Anyway, Have a Heart and Help out a Neighbor.” Similar snapshots fade in and out while a musician sings the “Begging for Change Healthcare Blues.”
Foes of expanding government-run health care also have stories of real people on YouTube and in advertisements. Ads by Conservatives for Patients Rights feature patients like Katie Brickell, a British citizen, who says she was denied a Pap smear that could have saved her from cervical cancer.
“In all likelihood, I only have a couple of years,” Brickell says in a YouTube version of her story. “I feel the National Health Service has let me down.”
Voters and lawmakers may be moved by the stories or turned off by what they see as emotional pandering. But in the weeks to come, the airwaves and blogosphere are sure to be populated by real people telling what happened to them when they got sick.
Obamas political operation, Organizing for America, put up a Web site last week where people can post their own health care tales and read the stories of others. The site says: “When the lobbyists for the status quo tell Congress to hold back, your personal story will give them the courage to press forward.”
Whats lost in the storytelling is policy nuance and the difficult question of how to finance an expansion of health coverage, said health economist Devon Herrick of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a research group that favors private solutions over government involvement. The real-people tactic, whether used by the left or the right, can distract from tough debate, he said.
“We cant have policy by anecdote,” Herrick said. Stories of people who have fallen through the cracks “have an oversized influence on the debate even as they obscure the greater question of what will help most people. Even a policy that does the greatest good may still have people who fall through the cracks.”
Families USA started its story bank before President Bill Clintons 1993 failed attempt to retool the health care system. The group now has a database of thousands of people with stories to tell.
“I ultimately believe real stories are more effective than using actors in some dramatization,” he said.
This week, Families USA and the drug lobby group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign using real people, including business owners.
“I want to provide health care to my employees,” said Maryland small-business owner Mark Derbyshire in one TV ad. “They deserve it. But its getting harder and harder and harder to do.”
Derbyshire owns a moving and storage company started by his father in 1956. He employs 35 workers in Aberdeen, Md., and covers all of them and their families. But he said he will soon give in to financial pressure and offer only individual coverage, not family coverage, to new hires.
“My role is to tell how serious it is,” he told The Associated Press. “Theres not a businessman out there who would disagree that the employer-based health coverage system is collapsing.”