This is why we need health care reform

ladyvampire
WASHINGTON (Sept. 30) – An early autumn chill was in the air as Regina Holliday's long summer of mourning came to an end this week. Just a few more brushstrokes on a gas station wall and her mural symbolizing the problems of the U.S. health care system would be complete."It's very cathartic to do this, to paint, to let out the stress and anxiety and everything that's happened," said Holliday, who has been sharing her family's medical nightmare in acrylic paint since a few days after her husband, Fred, died of cancer.That was June 17, the day the U.S. Senate began its debate on health care reform.On the last day of September, not 24 hours after the Senate Finance Committee rejected a public insurance program as part of its health reform bill, Holliday was about done. Painting, that is."Any struggle for good is not done overnight," said Holliday, 37, a widowed mother of two who pays 2 ½ times her monthly income as a preschool art teacher for health insurance.Still, she calls the influential tax-writing panel's action "very frustrating." Holliday knows about frustration. She watched elected officials "buckling" in the face of angry constituents who jammed town hall meetings in August to rail against "death panels" and "Obamacare.""It's so easy for them to say, 'No! We're against!'" said Holliday, who joined a counterprotest when "tea party" opponents marched here Sept. 12. "Those of us who are for it have to give these long, in-depth discussions of health care and all the myriad aspects and when you start doing that, it's easy to lose attention. It doesn't create sound bites."Holliday's 20-by-50-foot mural on the back wall of a BP station and across from a CVS drug store isn't easily summed up, either. The brooding piece is full of allusions from art history, from Jacques-Louis David's 18th-century masterpiece 'The Death of Marat' to Russian icons to Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica.' There is a giant film roll with frames depicting a tiny likeness of Fred, who was a film studies professor. "The end of a reel of a very short life," she said.There also are classic references. In a twist on the old "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" proverb, Holliday changed the monkeys to figures representing the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies and small businesses. Often she'll interpret the symbols for curious passers-by. Holliday explains it all on her Medical Advocacy blog, a mix of academic papers, video links, poems and stream-of-consciousness entries documenting her own personal health care crisis.The crisis came to a head earlier this year when Fred Holliday, who had held a series of temporary teaching jobs without benefits, got a full-time position at American University that included health insurance. Finally, he could afford to see a doctor about the blood in his urine and the fatigue that wouldn't let up. But it was too late. The 39-year-old was diagnosed with inoperable kidney cancer. If there was any good news, it was that the family had health insurance to cover Fred's treatment. The bad news, his wife learned, is that even those with coverage must negotiate reams of red tape at a time in their lives when they are most distraught and vulnerable.Holliday says she pleaded with doctors to tell her how long Fred had to live, so that the couple could decide when it made sense to stop painful treatments and allow the patient to spend what little time he had left with his family. "They said, 'This isn’t television. We don't do that.'""We were being left in the dark," said Holliday. But late nights searching the Internet brought the awful answer: two to three months. In her blog, on Facebook and on Twitter, Holliday recounts the 46 gurney trips Fred made as he was moved from hospital to hospital, hospice to home. During one transfer, a rough move by an orderly broke Fred's hip. Another time he was dropped.Even with health insurance, "they want you out" after two or three weeks in a hospital, she said. "The day you get there they ask, 'What is your discharge plan?' Well, it's like, my husband's really sick."Fred was sent home for the last time on June 11. The family had moved into a more expensive, two-bedroom apartment because their one-bedroom was too small for his hospital-sized bed and their sons Freddie, an 11-year-old with autism, and Isaac, 3.In less than a week, Fred was gone. Six days later, after the funeral and a memorial service, Holliday began her mural, first painting a black background on what had been whitewashed brick.She calls it "73 Cents." That's what it costs for a copy of each page in her husband's medical record. His file, which eventually filled a foot-thick notebook, was beyond her means.People began to notice the mural in July. It particularly drew the attention of the city's power brokers and media elite, who regularly gather for readings a few steps away at the Politics & Prose bookstore. "It's very powerful," said Ted Eytan, a family doctor and local advocate for opening medical records to patients. "For the first time, people have a place to go and have this conversation. I'm calling it a national monument."Eytan met Holliday through Twitter and has written about her on his blog. He distributed photos of the mural on the Internet, attracting the attention of the prestigious British Medical Journal, which put it on the front cover of its print edition. Holliday's handiwork also caught the eye of the BBC, Al-Jazeera and German television, as well as CNN and local TV stations. Newspaper reporters from the Netherlands, which has universal health care, weighed in. So did many bloggers. Voice of America called Holliday "a media darling."Democrats embraced her project. First lady Michelle Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invited Holliday to news conferences. Suddenly the college dropout found herself at academic meetings on health care reform.Friends also spread the word on Flickr and Facebook. Nancy Shearer, 39, who goes to the same nearby church as Holliday, posted photos on Facebook of the work-in-progress all summer. She said Holliday hasn't omitted a single detail of her ordeal, right down to painting the hornet that buzzed around Fred's hospital room because no staff would answer her pleas to swat it. "You look at it and see the little things that can get done" to comfort patients, Shearer said. "She just wants people to stop and think."Many did. Most responded positively, often pressing a $5 or $10 bill into her hand to help pay for paint. "So many people come up to me to share their stories of what happened to them and their spouse and their parent and their child. And they're oftentimes horror stories," Holliday said. "There's this feeling that you're not alone, that there are other people who have been through the exact same thing that you've been through."But others, a minority in this upscale neighborhood in Northwest Washington, are less sympathetic.