Eureka Springs advocate-activist Harrie Farrow recently traveled to Washington D.C. where she attended the Women’s March and participated in lobbying to promote the Medicare for All Act of 2019. The lobbying was sponsored by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Women’s March.
Farrow said the Medicare for All Act of 2019 is designed to improve and expand the Medicare program so that every person living in the U.S. has access to healthcare with comprehensive benefits.
“We had training Thursday night [Jan. 17] for the lobbying,” Farrow said. “The training was conducted by the staffer who wrote the bill, and the bill is being introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal from Washington and Rep. Debbie Dingell from Michigan.”
According to the Medicare for All Congressional Caucus, today’s healthcare system fails to provide quality, therapeutic healthcare as a right to all people living in the U.S. Currently 30 million Americans are uninsured and 40 million more can’t afford the cost of their co-pays and deductibles. Our life expectancy is lower than other nations, our infant mortality rate is high and the quality of healthcare is inferior to that in other industrialized countries. We waste hundreds of billions of dollars on administrative costs and our healthcare industry executives measure success in terms of profits instead of care, the Medicare Caucus said.
Farrow said the Medicare Act for 2019 improves and expands on the Medicare program. It covers everything from primary care, outpatient and prescription services, vision, dental, audiology, reproductive health, maternity and newborn care to home and community-based long-term services. It also includes treatment for mental health, substance abuse, lab work and ambulance services with the freedom to choose doctors and hospitals.
“They will be no premiums, deductibles, co pays or out-of-pocket expenses,” Farrow said. “One of the ways this is going to be paid for is doing away with all the money that is spent in administrative costs because it will be a single payer. Providers will then be able to focus on care instead of paperwork. The bill prevents providers from using the programs funds to profit off illness and injury or using payments for union busting, marketing or federal campaign contributions.”
It allows veterans and Native Americans to continue to get health services through the VA and Indian Health Services. The bill ends restrictions on reproductive services for women. And it would also allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. The bill’s sponsors say the U.S. has the highest drug prices in the world. The bill also provides for the transition, and the entire transition would happen within two years after the bill is passed.
People from across the country participated in the lobbying. Farrow and another woman from Arkansas, Catherine Snyder from Fayetteville, were assigned to go with constituents who were talking to their representatives from Illinois and Michigan.
“A lot of what we were doing was talking to people who were friendly to the legislation encouraging them to sign onto it or encouraging them to keep fighting hard for it,” Farrow said. “Catherine and I had a free half hour and decided to go to Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack’s office. We asked to talk to Womack’s legislative assistant in charge of healthcare policy. Geoff Hempelmann took us into a conference room and listened to our pitch on the healthcare bill for about 40 minutes. He gave his rapt attention and respect.
“I told him about a woman I met that morning in the lobby of a hotel who was not with our group. When she heard that we were here to lobby for healthcare, she said she was also in D.C. for healthcare reasons. She was crying as she told me her story. She was a young mother with a part-time job who had been diagnosed with cancer and could not afford the medication. She came to D.C. out of desperation, hoping to get medical marijuana to try to treat herself by that method. I told Mr. Hempelmann that she was just a random person I happened to bump into and there are stories like that all over the country.”
Farrow also told him she is aware of the fact Womack has some liberal views when it comes to the criminal justice system and drug dependency because of his son’s struggles with these issues. Hempelmann then told us of legislation Womack has backed to help in this regard concerning drug courts.
“But I mentioned this healthcare bill would nip the problem where it starts so people can get help with drug problems before abusers are a detriment to society and get picked up by law enforcement and end up in the courts,” Farrow said. “And they will not have to worry about the cost or availability of treatment.”
She said she also urged the congressman think about how other healthcare issues that he doesn’t have personal experiences with affect other people.
Farrow visited with Rep. Bobby Rush from Illinois, the only person who ever defeated Barack Obama in an election. They also went to the office of the one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, Rashida Tlaib.
“We had a very good visit with her staff who expressed interested in working together with the people in our group who belong to advocacy groups in her district,” Farrow said.
In the evening after the lobbying visits, and the President’s televised speech about trading limited DACA and TPS protections in exchange for the wall, she and others who’d lobbied marched in cold, drizzling rain to the home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“We called it a Mitch hunt demanding that he bring bills to a vote to reopen the government,” Farrow said. “The police arrived, but we were not doing anything illegal, so they just waited nearby. We were demanding that he do his job.”
After the Mitch action, Farrow went with the group to the “Kremlin Annex,” in a park in front of the White House where a local Indivisible group has been setting up protests every night for 180 days. That night they lit up letters that spelled out “ABUSER” and the night before the sign said “PERJURY.”
Farrow was working with the Center for Popular Democracy, the same group that she has been involved with regarding a number of earlier trips to Washington D.C., most of which involved her being arrested for civil disobedience in actions regarding healthcare, the GOP tax bill and the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Farrow says she has been arrested at least seven times in these actions since the summer of 2017.
She will speak at the EUUF on Elk Street Sunday, Feb. 3 at 11 a.m.