Kelly’s Corner- Hope for healthcare
Main Street Alliance is thrilled to introduce the Kelly’s Corner series, written by our Board Chair and long-time member, Kelly Conklin. As a small business owner with deep roots in MSA's values, Kelly provides a unique perspective on issues facing small businesses and local economies - and offers guidance for those looking to create positive change!
My name is Kelly Conklin, and I am the current Chair of Main Street Alliance. In 1978, my wife and I founded Foley Waite, an architectural woodworking firm located in Montclair, NJ. Throughout my work with Main Street Alliance, I have represented small business owners in the New Jersey Statehouse and Washington, D.C. I have advocated on issues including health care, retirement security, job quality, paid family and medical leave insurance, tax fairness, telecommunications, and many more.
Recently, I had an appointment today to see my "primary" physician. He's a nice young man and at his behest, I took long-delayed steps that revealed my health, such as it is, has become more complicated. I recently received the ‘Explanation of Benefits’ that detailed what this complication costs and it is breathtaking. At this point, I am "covered" by Medicare, a program I have paid into my entire working life. That, along with the monthly Medicare premiums and premiums for the "Part G supplemental coverage" and the "Part D" drug plan, just about fully meets the definition of the words cover, covered, and coverage; all that's left is for me to meet the annual deductible. And that is how, "I don't have to pay anything" to see a doctor, get medicine or go to a hospital.
If Medicare, as it stands today, was to become the national health insurance program; its "coverage" would still leave millions of working Americans a few thousand dollars a year short of actual as-needed healthcare. Of course, that would be a huge improvement over the asystematic, deeply inefficient, exceedingly expensive, highly profitable patchwork that rewards a tiny handful of executives who keep the wheezing, clanking, mess we call our healthcare system, alive. The fact is our approach to healthcare delivery is more like a patient receiving CPR than a healthy, systematic, morally centered system that puts the lives of patients and professionals alike, above profits.
As this Op-ed from the New York Times illustrates there is an immediate need for the old coalition between small businesses and healthcare providers to reboot. Back in 2009-10, at the height of the fight to rethink our approach to healthcare delivery, that coalition was key to getting the first modest but important step towards actual American universal healthcare, the Affordable Care Act, across the finish line. This article pointedly makes clear that our for-profit, corporate approach to healthcare is woefully inadequate. Weighted by a model that breaks down the relationship between those who need care and those trained and charged with delivering it, our healthcare professionals have more in common with a line worker in an auto assembly plant than they do the mythological physician whose profession is defined not by profit but by an oath to first do no harm.
Main Street Alliance was forged on the anvil of improving American healthcare and, in so doing, improving the health of all of us, employers, employees, and the community at large. We demonstrated change is possible, and that through political action, through organizing, we deliver a powerful voice. Healthcare in the wake of Covid is in crisis. We need to remain committed to the cause, to understand that until the next big step toward universal access to care and to the well-being of our healthcare professionals is taken, our work is not done.