Crowd of 400 rallies for reform of health care

As opinions in Congress continue to diverge on health-care reform, a group of Utahns converged Thursday afternoon at Sugarhouse Park in the largest local pro-reform rally yet, urging Congress to get busy this month and overhaul the private insurance industry they see as ostracizing working-class Americans.

About 400 people answered a call sent mostly via the Internet by the Democratic National Committee to show their support for significant health-care reform to occur as soon as Congress gets back in session this month.

"We've been letting this debate be controlled by the politicians and the pundits on cable TV," Nikki Norton, Utah director for Organizing for America, said prior to speaking at the rally. "We should be talking about this across the kitchen table and one-on-one," she said, noting that the group was planning to hand-deliver declarations calling for reform to Utah's congressional delegation. She also hopes to spread the message to neighborhoods this fall at weekend street fairs and by knocking on doors.

Working the crowd to sign up door-to-door participants was Dr. Sherman Bloom, who said the U.S. health-care system is in trouble.

"Whatever is done to reform it in no way will be as bad as the system we have now," Bloom said. The 75-year-old retired pathologist said that for him not to get involved in the reform effort would be to deny his experience as a pathologist, as a director of a staff of 200 and someone who deals with 2,000 different insurance companies.

"My doctor friends in England and France and these places that anti-reformers say have abysmal health-care systems think we have gone completely crazy," he said. "Crazy as in the fact that I have a daughter who is a pediatrician who just went on Medicaid in California because she has a pre-existing condition and can't get insurance."

The system has become a network of cracks, with working Americans getting lost when they lose their jobs, said Dr. Chase Peterson, former University of Utah president and a professor of medicine. The crowd loudly and frequently interrupted his remarks with applause.

"We have the best health care in the world, for the upper 20 percent of Americans," Peterson said, adding that the current system that won't insure or under-insures multitudes of hard-working citizens "makes just getting in your car like playing Russian roulette."

Access to health care isn't a choice or something that should be tied to employment, Peterson said. "It's a right. No one would argue that education isn't a right. We need universal coverage, period."