Interfaith organization pushing health care bill

Yawu Miller

Rabbi Moshe Waldoks looked around Temple Salem at the interfaith gathering of 200 or so activists, said “bless all those who live the precarious lives of not having health insurance,” and invited audience members to speak the names of uninsured family members.

Whites, blacks, Latinos and Haitians who are members of synagogues, churches and mosques in and around Boston stood and called out the names.

“We wish them health of body and health of spirit,” Waldoks said as he blew on his shofar, a ram’s horn used in Jewish religious rites.

He then turned his attention to the elected officials and policy makers who are currently considering various health care reform bills.

“Awaken the hearts and souls of those who are slumbering,” he implored in his prayer. “And you know who’s slumbering.”

While the sound of the shofar could barely be heard beyond the walls of Temple Salem, a Haitian Seventh Day Adventist church in Dorchester, the 40,000 signatures members of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization plan to garner for a health care reform ballot initiative will likely be heard as far away as Beacon Hill.

The initiative, called the Massachusetts Quality Affordable Health Care Act, would reduce the amount insurers charge for health care premiums in Massachusetts, provide sliding-scale assistance for moderate- and low-income families and require employers that don’t provide insurance to pay into a state fund.

GBIO is working with the MassAct! Coalition, a group led by Health Care for All, that is seeking to garner a total of 100,000 signatures for the initiative before it is placed on the 2006 ballot.

While only 62,825 signatures are needed to get a question on the ballot by law, having 100,000 will give the initiative the momentum it needs to spark real change, according to Health Care for All Executive Director John McDonough.

“It’s a way to express public sentiment,” he said. “It provides political impetus to help make this happen.”

If successful, the ballot initiative will also make the health care reform law.

“This is a way for citizens to be able to demonstrate in a serious way their desire for comprehensive and serious reform,” McDonough said.

To gather their 40,000 signatures, GBIO organizers plan to use 1,000 volunteers from their member organizations. At last week’s meeting, attendees were given kits including signature papers, copies of the proposed legislation and pledge cards.

Then volunteers hit the streets, soliciting signatures at community events.

The local effort mirrors a nation-wide effort spurred by Democratic members of Congress to create a single-payer national health care system.

But McDonough said it is unlikely that the Democrats’ bill will make it through the House.

“Until there’s a dramatic change in partisan control in Washington, there is no chance,” he said.

On both the local and national levels, there is an acute need for health care reform. The Rev. Ray Hammond, speaking at Temple Salem last week, noted that 18,000 people die every year in the U.S. because of a lack of access to health care. Most of his comments, however, were focused on those in Massachusetts who have no health insurance.

“I’m here to talk about 748,000 people for whom the reality and the potential for catastrophe is no less real than it is for the people in New Orleans,” he said, noting that the estimated ranks of uninsured here have grown by 100,000 in the last year.

“This is unjust, this is un-American and this is un-Godly,” he said. “This 748,000 is not a statistic, not an abstraction. They are real people.”