Randy Paul has a pail of gut-wrenching stories to tell about the brutal realities faced by chronically ill citizens in America's "health care system." Some involve family, others acquaintances. Still others involve pain and suffering. As bad, and usually worse, are the tales about creditors and reputation.

Take, for example, the time when Paul's middle daughter was 3, burning hot with fever, and the family's pediatrician wouldn't see her because mom and dad didn't have $36 to pay off an outstanding bill from another of their six kids. "I said, 'We don't have $36,'" Randy recalls. "'My wife and I together, if we added up all the money we have, it might come up to about 20 bucks.' We were that broke." The woman behind the window told them, "We won't see her."

News release
CWA Local 4730

The Communications Workers of America at Indiana University (CWA Local 4730) does welcome the decision of the Indiana University Board of Trustees and President Michael McRobbie for the modest 3 percent pay increase this fiscal year. We applaud their recognition that staff have contributed greatly in maintaining the world class status of Indiana University that has allowed Indiana University the ability to have record enrollments, $600 million in research grants and the ability to raise money for building projects.

However, CWA 4730 also believes that our mobilizations, rallying many sectors on the campus throughout the preceding months since last fiscal year, have contributed greatly in this decision.

"The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the 'single payer.'" - George Will, in his weekly newspaper column, Sunday, July 11, 2010

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Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act, and well they should. This 2,000-page contraption, this heap of handouts to the special interest lobbyists with a few shiny baubles thrown in to placate the common folk, was not only written by the for-profit health insurance industry but now will be implemented by former WellPoint/Anthem Vice President Liz Fowler, who actually penned much of the law in her role as Max Baucus' chief healthcare staff person for the Senate Finance Committee.

Editor's note: Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene participated in last month's U.S. Social Forum in Detroit. What follows are some of her observations from the experience.

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"This is what democracy looks like!" is a familiar chant at progressive marches and rallies. The second U.S. Social Forum (USSF), held in Detroit on June 22-26, put the chant into practice. Some 15,000 activists of all colors and kinds gathered for what the USSF Web site billed as a "U.S. movement-building process."

"It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples' solutions to the economic and ecological crisis," the Web site says. "The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful, multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history."

The debate on the City of Bloomington's decision to boycott businesses in Arizona due to its new immigration law is democracy in action. However, the arguments from people who say they will go out of their way and support Arizona in defiance of Bloomington's decision, like children rebelling against their parents, have missed the opportunity to logically discuss and pinpoint the real culprit -- businesses that employ undocumented workers.

In the immigration discussions, I have barely heard a word about the responsibilities of businesses and employers when they hire workers.

Until the federal government makes some movement on new immigration policy, we have to deal with what is in front of us. As long as undocumented workers can accept jobs with employers who face little scrutiny or oversight by the federal government in their hiring policies, they will continue to seek and find work.

When a used car salesman pressures you to sign on the dotted line before you have a chance to test drive the car, you, the buyer, should beware.

Same goes for Indiana citizens when politicians like Gov. Mitch Daniels push to cement Indiana's new property tax caps into the state constitution before we know the true impact of the legislation that took full effect only this year.

So far, the engine has been coughing, and a funny-colored smoke is belching from the exhaust. It seems every day we are hearing more bad news from Indiana communities: Teacher lay-offs in Anderson, extra-curricular school programs cancelled in Bloomington, bus routes and libraries at risk in Indianapolis.

Editor's Note: In the May 30 edition of The Bloomington Alternative, I published an open letter to Congressman Baron Hill, D-Ninth, about my experiences with America's health care system, specifically with my health insurance company. What follows is the congressman's unedited reply. - sh

June 9, 2010

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your recent open letter to me regarding H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I appreciate you taking the time to share your own experience and make your opinion known to the readers of The Bloomington Alternative on such an important issue as health insurance reform. I hope my response will provide an adequate assessment of the bill, as well as my reasons for supporting it when it passed the House of Representatives.

Throughout my congressional tenure, I have heard countless stories like yours of how our current health care system has failed hard-working Hoosier families, and how insurance companies have engaged in unconscionable practices not deployed by any other industry. And while I cannot speak firsthand about the personal experiences you shared in your letter to me, it does sound like the system failed you by not providing adequate information, as well as attributing added costs and other burdens on you as a patient during the care you received over the past few years.

Editor's note: The following letter was sent to Indiana Congressman Baron Hill, via his aides John Zody and Trent Deckard, simultaneous with its publication here. The Bloomington Alternative will publish any response the congressman sends, in full and unedited.

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Dear Congressman Hill:

Before I get to the point of this letter, I want to thank you for your vote to support health care reform. And I want to say I hope you were sincere and not just tailoring your message when you told Dr. Rob Stone and other Indiana citizens that the ultimate solution to America's health-care crisis will be a single-payer system.

It seems to me that you may understand that this first step, so-called ObamaCare, will do little more than further enable and enrich those who have destroyed what at one time was a health-care system to be proud of. So, as both a journalist and a registered, Ninth District constituent, I am going to share with you my personal experience with these people.

And, Congressman, as I've told anyone in the health-care system who would listen over the past two years, you really need to hang around with a better class of people. Seriously.

The WellPoint Inc. annual meeting on May 18 in Indianapolis was contentious and dramatic. The first story out was about the collapse of Board member William "Bucky" Bush, followed later by CEO Angela Braly's sudden adjournment of the meeting, while a line of concerned shareholders waited to have their questions answered.

That story went 'round the world, picked up by even the Singapore Straits Times, given legs by the irony of Mr. Bush getting assistance from the very doctor who had been regaling the board minutes before. That physician, of course, was me.

This was the fourth annual meeting of WellPoint that I have attended in my role as "a cheery thorn in [their] side," as the Indianapolis Business Journal called me in a May 29 article, "ER doc is affable WellPoint activist."

The modern era of fire as a weapon of war came with jellied gasoline, or napalm, dropped from bombers in the latter days of World War II. The bombing of Tokyo created a firestorm that incinerated more people than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

The modern era of corporate shareholder activism was born during the Vietnam War when the Medical Committee for Human Rights and its leader, Dr. Quentin Young, were given shares in Dow Chemical Company, infamous for manufacturing the napalm used in Vietnam. In 1968, Young submitted a resolution to Dow saying "napalm shall not be sold to any buyer unless that buyer gives reasonable assurances that the substance will not be used on or against human beings."

Dow fought inclusion of the proposal in its proxy statement, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initially sided with the company. Young appealed, and the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that part of the original intent of Congress in creating the SEC was "to give true vitality to the concept of corporate democracy," and the resolution made it onto the proxy.