Health Care Reform Update: Lend a Hand for Health Care Event Reaches Many Quad Citians

I spent most of the day Sunday, July 12 at the first complete display of the thousands of handprints we’ve collected over the last four years, mostly in the Quad Cities, trying to get to 18,000 – the number of people that used to die every year in the United States because they lack health insurance (the number has increased to at least 22,000). The coverage in the Quad-City Times was fantastic – above the fold on the first page of the Quad-City Area section of the paper. You can read all about the project in the article.

From an organizer’s perspective, the whole thing was very instructive. As you can probably gather from reading Blog for Iowa, we have been extremely busy working on health care reform the last six months. And we still have families and vacations and jobs and other mundane things that get in the way of our health care activism, so we can’t always pull together the “perfect” event. In this case we didn’t have as much time as we needed to build a crowd. (Graduates of Democracy for America’s Campaign Academy will know what I mean when I say you can’t build a crowd through email lists – you must make phone calls.) But we had an event with great visuals, perfect for television and even for print media. So even if the number of people who came to see the display in person was limited, thousands of our neighbors saw it on T.V. or read about it the next day in their paper. Since it took three people (one being yours truly) almost three hours just to lay all the cloth panels with the handprints on the floor (while others set up for the rest of the event), I am very pleased that we reached so many people.

Alta
Price is a physician practicing Pathology in Davenport, Iowa. One of
the original Deaniacs, she stays involved with Democracy for America,
Iowa, and the Quad Cities. She advocates for quality, affordable health
care for all, primarily as a volunteer with Progressive Action for the
Common Good (Health Care Reform Issue Forum).  Watch for Dr. Price's Health Care Reform Update every Tuesday here on Blog for Iowa.  E-Mail Alta Price