Health care reform forum fosters local ideas

The U.S. health care system needs to put patients ahead of profits, participants in a forum hosted by the First Unitarian Church agreed Sunday.

“Let’s forget about whether the patient has insurance or not,” one attendee, Larry Symonds, said. “Let’s make the first question, what are you going to do to get them into proper care? How does that affect things?”

Proposals for restrictions on administrative costs and a single-payer option of some kind were both strongly favored by the small group of about 20 who participated in this community event.

The First Unitarian Church organized the Sunday night discussion session as a follow-up to a recent screening of “Sicko,” the 2007 documentary by filmmaker Michael Moore. The downtown church, which has made promoting social justice one of its goals, regularly shows films and documentaries dealing with social issues.

Don Manning, a member of First Unitarian’s social justice committee, said they organized the health care forum to facilitate a free exchange of ideas in a nonjudgmental setting.

“We want to get all the ideas out on the table,” he said. “… It’s so important to do things on a local basis, to grow things locally, the way we want them done. And this is a democracy. We can take our ideas to the legislators and tell them, look, here’s what we’ve decided we want to do in Lynchburg.”

The forum lasted about 2 ½ hours and asked participants to address the problem of a health care system that “costs too much, wastes too much and leaves too many without care.”

Ideas presented at the end of the meeting included: single-payer health care, capping administrative costs and doctors’ salaries, free medical school, eliminating private insurance companies and raising corporate taxes to pay for a better health care system.

Many said they were concerned the current medical system focuses too heavily on generating profits.

The First Unitarian Church plans to compile a document summarizing each recommendation made. Manning said this was the first such event the church has hosted, but it will consider organizing others in the future.