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Photo: Abby Fox
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse talks with Andrea Keating at the Green Door about health care, as part of his tour last Wednesday morning of Main Street.
BY ABBY FOX
Last Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) saw firsthand how The Chocolate Delicacy makes their chocolate, admired locally-made products at the Green Door and complimented Sprigs on its flowers, but he was visiting all these Main Street shops for a specific reason – to hear their concerns about the American health care system.
“Something has to be done, because it’s out of control, on so many levels,” said Andrea Keating at the Green Door. She talked about her 24-year-old daughter applying to graduate school, who’s waiting tables and can’t afford health insurance; meanwhile she’s often mailed bogus insurance offers, promising to cover everything for just $200 a month. “I knew it couldn’t be real,” she said.
Whitehouse agreed with her that there needs to be “system-wide change,” and ticked off his ideas: cut back on duplication and waste and paperwork; make costs transparent; work harder on prevention; improve information technology; and create a public option to compete against private health care companies, to force businesses to do better business models. If there were a “gateway,” he said, where insurance companies could bid for people’s business out in the open, making their offers transparent, and people would be able to understand their choices more clearly.
“I think there’s room for really big improvement,” he said, and if reform is done right, it should lead to cost savings, not increases, he added, due to the current estimated annual $700-billion waste in health care.
At every stop, Main Streeters explained why they and their profits were too small to make health insurance affordable, through their work or for their employees, saying they got it from another source, usually a spouse.
Whitehouse took time to compliment every store. “This is beautiful,” he told Keating at the Green Door, and asked about her Rothschild Bird china. He admired Janice O’Connell for running Sprigs by herself, saying “Women are better copers; that’s the way it works in my family.” And he chatted about Allan Furst spy novels with a Simon Says employee named Emily, who was working behind the counter.
As much as Whitehouse seemed to enjoy himself, he explained that he was visiting strictly on business. “Right now health care is front and center by several lengths,” said his communications director Alex Swartsel.
“I wish you a lot of luck,” Keating told him, as he was leaving.
Whitehouse has an online “health care storyboard,” where people can post their own health care stories: http://whitehouse.senate.gov/issues/storyboard/?id=bfee1d7a-5caf-4c9d-87f8-466fca09a2bf&issue_id=d5381455-0781-4652-938f-4df34efbc6f4 and he’s on six committees in the Senate, including the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
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