Summer Reading for Health Reform Advocates

By Ad Hoc CDHC Intern Emma Libby and Ann Eldridge Malone

• Uninsured in America
• Nursing Against the Odds
• Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business--and Bad Medicine

Uninsured in America is an important new book written by two local health policy experts. Susan Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle traveled the country to interview 120 uninsured men and women and almost fifty medical providers, advocates and policymakers. Their goal was to better understand the situation America faces concerning the lack of health care and insurance for people with no-income, low-income, and the chronically ill.

Co-author Susan Sered presented this work at a forum sponsored by Suffolk University's Center for Women's Health and Human Rights that the Ad Hoc CDHC Intern attended. Sered focused her talk on women's health care and gave a series of disturbing facts regarding the decline in the availability of health insurance coverage for women.

Women, more often than men, leave the work force in order to attend to sick family members or household responsibilities; these once employed women are no longer receiving employment based health coverage, the most common form of coverage, forcing them to pay for doctors and medication out of pocket.

Large numbers of women in traditional marriages are insured under their husbands' employment benefits. If a marriage ends in divorce the woman will commonly no longer be covered by the husband's plan, from this fact Sered discovered in her research a large disparity in the number of insured divorced women and women in a traditional family unit. Sered indicated that these situations are all too common and leading to a growing disparity between women and men receiving insurance coverage in this country.

Sered described in her talk the research that led her to Mississippi, which she identified as having the worst health care of the fifty states. In Mississippi doctors are allowed to choose their own patients and, therefore, rarely take patients with Medicaid because the compensation for services is lower than other insurance companies. This combination of dire characteristics has caused many men and women to fall through the cracks of the health care system. A number of interviews were conducted there, one of which was related in Sered's discussion.

A divorced woman living in Mississippi was once married to an abusive ex-military officer covered by the health benefits of the department of defense. She has three children one of which is ill and needs frequent medical care. In addition the mother frequently experiences severe migraine headaches. Both mother and child need a regular physician to monitor their health, but because the mother is no longer covered under her former husband's policy she cannot afford a regular physician. The mother also has difficulty maintaining a job because she frequently needs to stay home with her children. She can barely afford to keep food in her children's mouths and roof over their heads.

This story is the embodiment of what is wrong with the health care system; without health care coverage for her family she will continue to rely on expensive emergency room visits and charity.

Uninsured In America is a compelling and personal look into the lives of those struggling to get needed health care in America. It reveals that many are made sicker by the impact of policies created by politicians and insurance companies. It also heralds a warning for us all, that life can change in drastic and painful ways if you become sick while uninsured in America

Susan Sered is an anthropologist and Research Director of the Religion, Health, and Healing Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. Co-author Rushika Fernandopulle is a physician and Executive Director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement.

Nursing Against the Odds is another important new book by a local health care author; click here to read excerpts and purchase the book. You can also read this review in the International Herald Tribune.

In Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business--and Bad Medicine Time magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative Bartlett and Steele team pulls back the curtain on the health care industry to explain exactly how things grew so out of control. The Ad Hoc CDHC is making plans to co-host a health reform forum that will include these authors, so bookmark our website and check back for details.