Madison Park founder of Code Blue Now building grass-roots health-care reform movement
The importance of fostering a healthy community is never far from Madison Park resident Kathleen O'Connor's mind. Having grown up in a Navy family, she lived all over the country and spent her high school years in Japan, never staying long enough to grow hometown roots. At an early age she understood what she was missing, and O'Connor promised herself that she would become involved with her neighbors and city once she found a community she loved. In 1962, when she came to Seattle to study Japanese in college, O'Connor found the community she longed for.
After living all over the Emerald City, the 63-year-old health-care author, consultant and industry analyst settled in Madison Park. "I fell in love with it," said O'Connor, who cited the walkable nature and easy access to transportation as some of her favorite aspects of the area. "It's a real neighborhood, and a sense of community is real important to me, having been a Navy child, where there was no community."
O'Connor has spent the last 30 years of her life working in the health- care industry, but when her father died in 1999 - eight years after the tragic of her 13-year-old son on Christmas - she decided to focus her experience and resources to help reform America's fractured health-care system.
A grassroots movement
"I've been writing about healthcare policy and politics for about 30 years, and four years ago, I just got totally fed up because everyone was saying the same thing over and over again, louder and louder, as if it would make a difference, but nobody was doing anything," O'Connor asserted.
With her son gone, O'Connor didn't see a need to preserve an estate with the money she inherited after her father's death. Instead, she founded Code Blue Now, a nonprofi t, non-partisan organization seeking to "create strong public will for change by engaging the public in designing, shaping and promoting a template for a new health care system." To that end, O'Connor, a self-espoused Democrat, put up $10,000 of her own money for the organization's contest entitled Build An American Health Care System.
Her Republican friend Bill Baldwin ,from the Baldwin Resource Group in Bellevue, gave $5,000 for the second-place purse. "We both believe in the ingenuity of the American public to solve the problem," O'Connor said. With more than 100 entries submitted, Code Blue Now chose the winners in 2003 and used the momentum to build on their healthcare reform objectives.
Fighting the system
In the early 90s, O'Connor worked for a for-profi t HMO and, until 2000, had her own marketing communications business in healthcare, specializing in trade reporting. The experiences were revelatory.
"When you're a trade reporter and not an investigative reporter, people will tell you anything," O'Connor said. She tells stories of listening to industry officials say things like they didn't need to work to prevent osteoporosis in women because most women don't get it until they were 62 and Medicare would then take care of them, and that HMOs don't need to cover contraceptives because they're cheap and women would buy them regardless.
This total lack of health promotion or care for the client was hard to digest, O'Connor pins the problems beginning at the end of World War II. During the war, politicians and the business community backed the country into employer-based insurance because raises for a wartime work force were generally off the table.
"We're the only country that makes health care a form of employee compensation, and that creates a really bizarre dynamic," O'Connor said.
To clarify, O'Connor recalls when she was working at the University of Washington. There were a few years where her wages were frozen, and the university administrators tried compensating for the lack of wages by offering expanded dental and mental-health insurance benefi ts. "Consequently, everybody I knew was getting a crown and seeing a shrink," O'Connor laughed. "We've created a use-it-or-lose-it mentality."
Unfortunately, O'Connor sees no reason for the big players in America's health-care industry to want to change. "Insurance companies have no incentive to do health promotion," O'Connor asserted. "People aren't in an insurance plan long enough. Most people are in an insurance plan for three years or less. The insurance companies will tell you that they don't want to do promotion because someone else is going to get the economic benefi t of their investment."
Creating solutions
If we worked on health promotion to cover a whole geographic area like Seattle, O'Connor argues, we could make a benefi cial difference for the people and the health-care entities that live and operate within the area. Such a focus toward prevention rather than cure would be the monumental change O'Connor is hoping to realize.
"People really want something that that's in the middle," O'Connor emphasized. "What we make the mistake of doing in the United States is asking how we're going to pay for it versus deciding what [our healthcare system] is supposed to do and how it's going to be organized before worrying how to pay for it."
For anecdotal guidance, O'Connor points to France, Germany and Japan, all of which, she says, have a health-care structure similar to what now exists in the United States. In fact, the World Health Organization consistently ranks France first in health care. O'Connor notes that health-care networks are structured to cover everyone with a combination of private funds, employer benefi ts and government programs. It's a daunting task to get all three parties working toward the healthier systems of our international friends. As inspiration, O'Connor looks to our country's revolutionary suffragist and civil rights movements.
"What it takes is the conviction that you can have something that's better, that you can have something that works," O'Connor said. To move in that direction, Code Blue Now plans to take the results of its ongoing health surveys to help them form partnerships with, preferably, non-profit and nonpartisan organizations that are concerned about health care but don't necessarily have a solution they're wedded to. "None of this takes rocket science," O'Connor asserted. "It takes public will."
From there, O'Connor said, Code Blue Now plans to build consensus within its partnerships and then pressure local, state and federal politicians to make a lasting, meaningful change in America's health care system. The organization's goal is to have a "voters health-care platform," similar to the Declaration of Independence, ready by the middle to end of 2009. The burgeoning coalition will then use its collective voting power to lobby the Congress, Senate and White House with its platform heavily in 2010, when all of Congress and a third of the Senate is up for election.
"Americans love to solve problems," said O'Connor, who stressed that the partnerships Code Blue Now is working to build have the aim to fi nd common ground on the health-care issue that spans our countries often-divisive political and ideological boundaries. "If we can fi nd a safe place to have a safe conversation, I think we can get somewhere... We really need to take care of our own and take care of our communities."
Visit www.codebluenow.org to take its health-care survey, partake in online health-care discussion forums and learn more about America's health care issues. Erik Hansen may be reached via mptimes@nwlink.com.
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