President Clinton said Wednesday night that he hears a clamoring among Americans for health-care reform.
But around Chicago and its suburbs, the desire for improved health coverage is tempered by worry, concern and confusion. At best, there is lukewarm support for plans to overhaul the health-care system.
And Clinton’s prime-time news conference didn’t do much to ease those anxieties.
Here is a sampling of what Chicago-area residents are saying about health-care reform.
Single mom has doubts
Deborah Holder, 43, has decent health benefits through her data processing job with Interstate Steel in Des Plaines.
“I already have a package,” said Holder, a single mother who lives in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. “I’m watching to see how the overall decision is going to affect what I already have. If this really passes, I’m worried that my premiums are going to go up. So I might have to take more out of my paycheck to pay for it.”
The way Holder figures it, if the government determines that everyone is entitled to mediocre coverage, then companies like the one she works for will have an incentive to lower their benefits in order to be on a par with everybody else.
“If it’s mandatory, then a whole lot of things will have to change, including our doctors,” she said.
Two years ago, while holding another data processing job with the Chicago & North Western Railway, her health insurance paid for her to attend a 28-day in-patient substance-abuse rehabilitation program. The opportunity allowed her to turn her life around.
Any health-reform package ought to give everyone the same opportunity, she said. But it’s a mystery to her whether those kinds of social health programs will be included.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “They aren’t talking about exactly what is covered.”
Just getting over earlier bills
“I can’t go out rollerblading or water-skiing if I don’t have insurance. It’s been a pretty poor summer,” said uninsured Bloomingdale resident Lynn Prete, 34. “If I have an accident, what do I have to rely on?”
By day, Prete attends the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. At night, she works as a hostess at the Seven Dwarfs Family Restaurant, a Wheaton coffee shop on Roosevelt Road.
She changed jobs in February to go back to school. That move cost Prete her health coverage, a $17-a-week policy she says only covered major medical expenses. Though her boss has offered to place her on the restaurant’s plan, she says she can’t afford the $100 monthly rate.
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Prete just finished paying off a $400 debt from a hospital stay four years ago when she had insurance. Then, she got socked with outpatient surgery that cost her $600 after her insurance paid its share. Add to that a $3,000 loan she took out for her dental bills, and Prete is ready for health-care reform.
But she is confused by what Congress is considering.
Meanwhile, although she is worried for herself, Prete says she is most concerned about how her co-workers, primarily single parents, will fare under a new program. Even if employers are required to pay most of the coverage, she wonders how employees will meet their share.
Universal coverage fine
As head of the Pilsen Resurrection Development Corp., a non-profit group trying to build low-cost housing in Pilsen, Raul Raymundo, 29, knows too well how families struggle to balance rent payments, food bills and health-care costs.
“Obviously, universal coverage is appealing here. You have a lot of people employed at low wages with no insurance or huge deductibles and really big families,” he said.
But, he noted, many of the local Hispanic-owned small businesses and factories fear they’ll be hurt financially and forced to lay off workers. Even his organization will have to spend more on health care for employees, whose full-time workers are covered in a health maintenance organization.
“But I don’t think the small businesses will be hurt,” Raymundo said. “They’ll be ahead because they’ll have healthier, more productive workers.”
Unemployed and uninsured
Lillian Redd, 39, admitted she hasn’t kept up with the details of the health-reform debate. But what she has picked up mostly from TV reports has her believing that health reform will mostly benefit people who have jobs.
That concerns Redd, a North Lawndale resident who lost her job at Spiegel in Downers Grove in December. With that, she lost her health insurance-and she expects a baby in October.
Redd, who has daughters ages 7 and 9, lives with an aunt. She had been paying for her monthly prenatal visits using her unemployment compensation. But those benefits ended in June.
Finding a job is difficult when you’re six months’ pregnant, she said. So with her expected delivery date only about three months away, she is desperately trying to get on public aid and obtain a medical card.
“I would have like to have known-even though I was laid off-that the insurance covered me for at least a year,” Redd said.
Mandates questioned
For Kelly Spaulding of Wauconda, the debate boils down to how her family of three will be covered. Her chief concern is ensuring that she, her husband and infant son will be well-cared for and have some choices for preventive and crisis care.
Her family is well-covered, and she is willing to spend a bit more on health if that coverage is assured. “I guess the bottom line is that I pay now for my insurance and I expect that down the line I’ll pay a little more,” said Spaulding, a 36-year-old senior product manager at Quill Corp. in Lincolnshire. “That doesn’t bother me.”
Universal coverage is a good idea, she said, but added that the cost of it troubles her. “Everyone deserves to be insured, one way or another,” she said. “But I don’t know if employers should have to pay for all that.”
Something for nothing
A lifetime of hard work and savings has allowed Margaret Pareti, 89, and Sylvia Winter, 83, to live a comfortable retirement in a Hoffman Estates seniors residence.
The two friends, both widowed, look at the debate and see people unwilling to make the same sacrifices they have had to make.
Pareti raised three children and helped her husband run Ernie’s Bleachers, a tavern and restaurant across from Wrigley Field, for 36 years. Winter is a former homemaker whose husband worked until he was 71 as a photo engraver.
Pareti concedes that, as small business owners, it wasn’t always easy for her and her husband to pay for insurance. But she and Winter worry that younger generations have come to expect something for nothing.
“I really do think they’re trying to make it too easy for people,” Winter said. “They want to take care of people from the cradle to the grave. I think this is wrong.”
“You have to work for it. We had to work for ours,” Pareti said. “I’m going to be 90. I’m protected, and I hope I’m taken care of properly, like I took care of my husband. Why worry about it?”
But Pareti worries about her children and her grandchildren, including a son whose customized paint company employs about 20 people. The women think it’s unfair for employers to be expected to pick up most of the tab.
As for Clinton’s appearance on television, Winter was unimpressed. “He didn’t tell you anything,” she said.
Pareti opted to skip the Clinton performance. Instead, she played pool with her pals at the senior center.
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