Fattah announces his health plan
January 27, 2007
Posted on Fri, Jan. 26, 2007
Fattah proposes checkups yearly for the uninsured
“Health care is going to be a priority,” the mayoral candidate said of his latest policy initiative.
By Marcia Gelbart
Inquirer Staff Writer
Mayoral candidate Chaka Fattah wants Philadelphia doctors and other medical professionals to provide free yearly checkups for every uninsured Philadelphian. He also wants city workers, union and nonunion, to get health coverage from the same insurance provider.
He even wants to recast himself as Philly’s own Richard Simmons, leading residents in morning stretches.
“We can’t do the things I want to do” – generate new jobs and expand education programs – “unless our citizens are healthy,” Fattah said yesterday at St. Christopher’s Hospital, where he unveiled a wide-ranging assortment of health-care proposals, the third in a series of policy initiatives released by his campaign. “I’m here to say that health care is going to be a priority of a Fattah administration.”
This makes him the first among five Democratic mayoral rivals to address health care in detail as the campaign for the May 15 primary heats up.
Health insurance costs here, as in other cities, have been skyrocketing. The the cost of insuring city employees is projected to grow by $147 million in the next five years.
“This is one of the key financial issues that is facing the city, and the next mayor is going to have to tackle it, and tackle it fairly quickly,” said Rob Dubow, executive director of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, the city’s fiscal overseer.
Fattah proposes lowering costs by using competitive bidding to select a single health insurer to cover the city’s 23,000 municipal employees, and possibly enlarge the pool to include Philadelphia School District workers and others.
Most city employees are now insured by various providers who have contracts with the city’s four municipal unions. Right now, the health-care cost per employee is $12,623.
“Every mayor wants to consolidate stuff to control costs,” said Bob Wolper, a longtime consultant for AFSCME District Council 33, which represents the city’s blue-collar workers. Doing so would hardly be easy, he said.
“The tradition for public-sector workers over the years has been to get a good benefits package in lieu of [higher] wages,” he said, “and so people will be leery about tearing it apart and starting from scratch.”
District Council 47 president Tom Cronin, whose members are mostly white-collar municipal workers, declined comment for now on Fattah’s plan, except to call it “a serious proposal.”
While the use of a single provider could lower expenses, other parts of Fattah’s plan would cost money, such as renovating the city’s district health centers and expanding their hours into the evenings and weekends.
The plan included no item-by-item cost analysis, but Fattah said the entire initiative would cost $27 million to $36 million a year.
Some of the proposals would cost nothing. For instance, he envisions an all-volunteer network of medical professionals to give free annual checkups to the city’s 140,000 uninsured residents.
This idea drew a cautious welcome from the head of a doctors’ group. “I think if it were organized, and if it were distributed fairly, physicians might be willing and able to provide services in kind as it were,” George M. Wohlreich, director and chief executive officer of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, said last night.
Other ideas on Fattah’s list have been under way in the Street administration, such as removing lead paint from buildings citywide. And one proposal reads as if written by Street, a fitness buff: If elected, “Fattah will begin each of his quarterly visits to the 10 Councilmanic districts with an exercise event, during which he will lead people from the neighborhood in a morning exercise activity.”
Phila Health Center 3-5 month wait
January 9, 2007
Press release
Contact: Brady Russell,
Organizer, 267.971.1680
Report: It takes too long to see a city doctor
Low-income workers and the uninsured call for an accessible public primary care system
(Philadelphia – 1/9/2006) – The medically uninsured are waiting as long as five months to get into City run District Health Centers for the first time, according to a new report by the Philadelphia Unemployment Project [P.U.P.] called “Waiting: 3-to-5 months for first appointments at District Health Centers.” This morning, members of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project [P.U.P.] gathered outside of Health Center #2 with their supporters to release the report and call on the city to do more for people without insurance.
“We want the Health Centers to have enough staff so people can be seen,” said Irma Sumler, a member of P.U.P’s Health Care Committee and user of Health Center #3. “We also want the hours extended every night and regular hours on Saturday. The people working without insurance can’t afford to take off to go to the doctor.”
According to the most recent data from the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation’s Community Health Database [http://www.phmc.org/chdb/], nearly 140,000 people are living without health insurance in Philadelphia. Nationally, 82% of them are in families headed by workers, and 59% of uninsured workers work full-time.*
“People assume that if you’ve got a full time job, then you don’t have a problem with health care. The truth is that most uninsured people have jobs. We can see that in entry level jobs people don’t get the benefits that provide health care. How can you look for work or expect to work if you don’t believe you have a way to protect the health of you and your family?” Andre Butler, chair of the P.U.P board and Health Center #10 user, said.
Sumler said she continued using the Health Center even after she got onto Medicare and no longer had to. She said she likes going to the health centers, but added that she’s seen services diminish as staff have moved on or retired, “They used to be a one-stop shop for everything you needed, which is how it should be.”
The “Waiting” report compiles the results of several dozen calls made by PUP members and staff on two different occassions (first in the Summer and then in the Fall), calling all the health centers to ask for a first appointment for an uninsured, Philadelphia resident. While a few people were offered appointments within a month, that was only sporadically. Over two-thirds of the callers were offered appointments at least three months out, some as late as five months out.
The results come as no surprise to long-time supporters and users of District Health Centers. Sue Rosenthal, chair of Health Center #10’s Community Board, issued a statement on behalf of all the Community Board chairs, “We – the chairs of the eight Philadelphia Health Center Community Boards – are deeply disturbed by the results of your research … It is our hope your report will galvanize the Administration to relieve the unnecessary misery and danger caused to Health Center patients by the Administrations unconsionable delays.” Rosenthal explained that the City failed to hire for the new positions approved for the Health Centers in the 2006 budget and did a poor job of refilling empty positions.
Richard Weisshaupt, Senior Attorney at Community Legal Services, said: “The kind of wait times documented by PUP are simply not acceptable — we would not tolerate such delay in other City services essential to public health and safety, like police and fire. Hopefully, the uncovering of this scandal will be the first step towards fixing this terrible problem.”
Currently, each District Health Center has a different night of the week that it stays open later than 4:30 PM. Only Health Center #2 has Saturday hours, which run from 8AM to Noon. All residents of Philadelphia may access District Health Centers, whether or not they have insurance. To find a Health Center near you, call, (215) 685-6790.
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The Philadelphia Unemployment Project [PUP]is a membership organization of unemployed and low-wage workers. It began in 1975 to help meet the needs of the unemployed during that year’s recession. PUP has remained a leader in the struggle for economic justice in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.
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