Russell invokes Kennedy at health-care rally

By David Carkhuff Staff writer david@portlanddailysun.me

Forget riding a bus across the country. State Rep. Diane Russell said she only needed a cab ride across town to a health-care rally in the Old Port Wednesday to hear about the struggles people face with health care.

"On my way here, I was talking to the cab driver. And he went off. I didn't tell him who I was. But he went off about how we need quality assurance in health care, how he needs access to it. How his family really struggles to make sure that they can make ends meet," Russell said.

Russell, D-Portland, spoke at a campaign event featuring the Highway to Health Care Reform bus tour, a campaign of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in support of a public or government option for health coverage. The tour features a green RV-style bus emblazoned with slogans supporting health care and logos of pro-reform groups.

Speakers at the afternoon rally also invoked the memory of longtime health-care reform advocate Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died Tuesday, and acknowledged the importance of Maine's senators in passing health care legislation.

"His legacy has been for fighting for almost five decades for universal access to health care," Russell said of Kennedy, before holding a moment of silence in his honor.

Maine was nearly the final stop of the bus tour, which started Aug. 12 in Bismarck, N.D., passed through Nebraska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia and Delaware before hitting two cities in Maine — Portland and Bangor, both on Wednesday.

The campaign planned a final event in Washington, D.C.

"As Maine goes, the rest of the country will, too," said Marianne von Nordeck, representing Highway to Health Care Reform, explaining the importance of Maine on the tour.

"As far as health care goes, we are a real swing state, we have two of the most influential senators in the whole country who are going to be taking a vote on health care," she said, referring to Republican U.S. senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.

Snowe is a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care, and part of a select working group of senior committee members meeting daily with Democratic leaders on health care reform. In a recent Portland appearance, Snowe cut off discussion of a public option but said her position has been that "I don't support a public option."

President Obama's health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, told CNN on Aug. 15 that a direct government role was "not the essential element" — a day after the president seemed to back away from a public option as well.

“The public option — whether we have it or we don’t have it — is not the entirety of health care reform,” President Obama said at a town hall in Grand Junction, Colo., on Aug. 14. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it. And, by the way, it’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else.”

President Obama's statement was overplayed, according to von Nordeck.

"I think it got a lot of play in the media and framed in the context of some loud, minority opposition at the town halls," she said. "But no one thinks it represents a real shift in policy from him. He has continued to say that he thinks the best way to reform health insurance in this country is to do the public option, and we're happy for that."

Snowe, at her congressional website, downplayed the public option as a factor in health care reform.

"We’re not talking about government-run health care — we’re talking about ensuring Americans have access to meaningful, high-quality, affordable health coverage — and we are moving heaven and earth to reach that objective," she wrote in an Aug. 6 update after meeting with the president.

A Gallup poll from Aug. 6 to 9 found that more people disapproved of the president's handling of health care policy than supported it, but polling also indicates that Americans express even less confidence in Republicans' handling of health care.

Russell told the gathering that she gathers feedback while working as a cashier at a Munjoy Hill market.

"When I look at state policy, I first look from behind the counter from where I work up at Colucci's. I cash people out at the register on a regular basis, and I hear stories of people in my community and from communities where people are visiting from other towns, talking about their health care problems, the issues that they face," she said.

The Highway to Health Care Reform bus tour won't be the last word from the progressive side of the debate. AFSCME, with 1.6 million members, also has joined Health Care for America Now to launch a new $650,000 television advertising campaign targeting Republican leadership in the House and Senate and seven additional Republican members of Congress.

"It's still early in the process," von Nordeck said.