Follow up on Portsmouth Health Care Forum

Thanks to everyone who came out for the Community Health Care Forum at the Portsmouth Public Library on Monday, December 29. The well-attended event -- which was one of over 300 similar forums held nationwide -- was organized by Dr. Thomas Clairmont of Portsmouth Primary Care Associates in response to a request from the Obama transition team for community input on health care reform.

Participant comments were uniformly thoughtful and constructive -- remarks from several primary care physicians and other local health care professionals were especially informative, as were reports from health care consumers about barriers to purchasing individual health plans and the rising cost of group coverage. Dr. Clairmont shared a copy of the event summary he submitted to the transition team; which includes the key points of the discussion -- you can read it here (in .pdf).

At our Seacoast for Change brunch and community meeting earlier in December, supporters identified health care reform as top priority for local action. In the coming months, we’ll be on the lookout for more opportunities to engage the Seacoast community in discussion and action to support affordable, high-quality health care for all (please send your suggestions to Judy Stadtman at yeswecan.nh@gmail.com). Meanwhile, readers may be interested in this recent article by Niko Karvounis of the Century Foundation (reprinted by AlterNet). Karvounis critiques mainstream media coverage of health care policy developments, noting that news stories tend to focus on high-conflict political debates surrounding the health care reform, rather than providing substantive coverage of the public impact of proposed changes.

“There's no question that health care reform won't be easy; Obama definitely has his work cut out for him, and the public should know it,” Kavournis writes.

“But already the media seem to be licking their chops at the political controversies they see in the near future. Discussions of health care reform are already being wrapped in Obama's political persona, with reports cautioning that partisanship may slay the Uniter and that the Chosen One may come up short. If we're seeing this sort of coverage now, you have to wonder if the media will have the wherewithal to focus on policy once health care reform becomes a long, procedural slog as legislators debate some of the 115 discrete options for reform that the Congressional Budget Office has recently outlined.”

You can read the whole thing here.