by Alta Price

On Saturday, March 14, 2009, Senator Tom Harkin spoke at St. Ambrose University on how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (economic stimulus package) impacts health care in Iowa. Yours truly attended the event and helped capture Senator Harkin’s handprint for the 18,000 Hands for Health Project, an ongoing effort to collect one handprint for each of the 18,000 people who die every year in this country for lack of access to health care.

This statistic comes from a 2004 report on the consequences of uninsurance from the Institute of Medicine  – I suspect the number of unnecessary deaths has increased since then. The Health Care Reform Issue Forum of Progressive Action for the Common Good, led by Karen Metcalf (pictured with Senator Harkin), has collected about 7,000 handprints, almost all of them in the Quad Cities.  Senator Harkin’s handprint ended up right next to President Obama’s handprint on our “V.I.P. panel”.

We also travelled to Cedar Rapids, where my daughter, Meredith, captured DNC Chair Howard Dean’s handprint.

Although one purpose of the Senator’s visit to St. Ambrose was to tout the “Congressionally-directed funding” (a.k.a. “earmarks”) that allowed him to direct some funding in the recently passed budget bill towards the new Health Sciences Center to be constructed at St. Ambrose, most of his comments related to the impact of the economic stimulus bill on health care in Iowa. (His arguments in favor of “earmarks” were illuminating and convincing. But that’s a different topic!)

Although most of the numbers he gave related to the whole country, one Iowa-specific number is the extra $550 million for Medicaid spending for the 27-month period beginning 10/1/2008 through 12/31/2010. The New England Journal of Medicine (March 12, 2009) has a great summary of all the health-related spending in the stimulus bill.

For those of you planning to advocate for affordable, quality health care for all, Senator Harkin gave a timeline for major health care reform legislation in Congress. He expects “skeleton” bills to come out of the House and Senate in May or June, voting to occur before the August recess, and the conference committee to resolve differences between the bills passed in the Senate and House in time for President Obama to sign the bill by October. Wow! Time to gear up for action, don’t you think?