Being that nationally known author and ever-present progressive David Swanson has already picked up on our Melanie-Care for All Act in his article “Single-Payer Healthcare Coming to Missouri“, I’ve decided to include the original statement here. ~ Byron

Melanie Cared For Us All

“If elected, I will sponsor the “Melanie-Care for All Act”, providing a simple plan to get all of our Missourian families the coverage, protection and care we deserve.” ~ Byron DeLear, Mo. State Rep. Candidate 79th District (http://www.ByronDeLear.org)

A dear friend of mine, Melanie Shouse, recently passed away from breast cancer. She found a lump in her breast but couldn’t afford to see a doctor. Through the course of her disease she tirelessly continued to advocate for health-care for all as a moral imperative. I met her through our shared work as concerned citizens and like many of her friends and colleagues was inspired by her unbridled energy and enthusiasm to affect positive change. Even in the midst of great personal suffering, Melanie selflessly put it all on the line and did the best she could to help us all. Her story was propelled to the national stage with President Obama mentioning her in a speech and culminating with “Melanie’s March” from Philadelphia to Washington DC, ending with a rally attended by Senate leader Harry Reid and other members of Congress.

If Melanie had access to affordable health care, her untimely death may have been prevented. Seeing a doctor was simply too expensive just as it is for tens of thousands of Missourians, whose fear of skyrocketing health-care costs are justified. Health insurance premiums in Missouri have risen 82.5% in the last decade, consequently, the vast majority of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical costs, for both the insured and uninsured alike. This creates a specter of fear for families all across our state. Melanie’s death is one of thousands of lives needlessly lost due to our current broken and inhumane health-care insurance system.

According to a recent Harvard Study, 45,000 Americans perish each year due to lack of preventive or primary health care, this equals approximately 800 Missourians like Melanie. 800 Missourians die each year due to our broken health care system. This is a moral crisis, and suggests that we should all take a step back from the raging debate to ask ourselves, in a perfect world, what would our ideal system be? What do we want for the family of Missouri? And then takes steps to make that ideal a reality, or get as close to it as possible.

Many nations have struggled with the health-care debate before us. What’s the best way to adopt complete health care coverage for all? The world is full of examples of different solutions to this question. But the trends over time are very specific, what they show is that as modern societies effort toward equitable progress, universal coverage, regardless of class distinctions, is the desirable end result. This goes to the heart of what insurance is and mathematically what ‘risk pools’ are all about. Pooling risk makes a community, state and nation stronger. It protects us all against personal catastrophe. Currently, in the US, health insurance corporations cherry pick through the populace to determine who’s worthy of coverage, or how to deny care once you become sick. This is at odds with the healing mandate of the medical profession, and has to be turned around.

The right thing to do, is to cover all our citizens with health care. Medicare covers and protects more than 800,000 Missourians — the first bill I will support will be a Medicare-for-All type plan for Missouri. In honor of our local heroine, Melanie Shouse, if elected, I will sponsor the “Melanie-Care for All Act”, providing a simple plan to get all of our Missourian families the coverage, protection and care we deserve.

Sincerely, and in your service,

Byron DeLear

Mo. State Rep. Candidate 79th District

ByronDeLear@gmail.com

http://www.ByronDeLear.org

A report released Thursday entitled, “Lives on the Line: The Deadly Cost of Delaying Health Reform,” sheds light on the real moral issue at the heart of America’s national debate on health care: people needlessly dying because they don’t have access to preventive or primary medical care.

At a current rate of 68 deaths each and every day, the Families USA report cautions that without immediate action on health care reform, the body count will grow to a shocking 84 people a day in 2019: this is over 30,000 dead each year; a far more conservative estimate than the well-known Harvard study claiming 45,000 unnecessary deaths are happening each year.

Bottom line: not only are we facing an economic emergency in regard to our need for health care reform, but with this level of inhumanity and carnage associated with the status quo, for political actors to not face this head-on shows a certain moral depravity and unwillingness to break out of a political death spiral. As Republicans dissembled at the summit, they continued on their way down.    

What every other Western democracy has succeeded at delivering to their citizens, Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Money have prevented here at home. Who cares if people die, as long as the bottom line and our contractual performance clauses are sated? Unfortunatly, only in America.

But I’ll make the argument that this is simply un-American. The blessings of modernity and medical science are not solely reserved for the wealthy, nor would the 18th century enlightenment principles that birthed our nation sanctify the presence of a mighty multi-national conglomerate divvying out life or death dictates strictly based on profits and compensation.

What depths have we let our peculiar fascination with market populism drive us to?  

Even the vaunted Adam Smith, heralded as the ideological champion of “free markets” by Republicans, historians, and economists, had doubts about the moral capacity of corporate behavior; especially when incentives for “hurtfulness” were designed into the system.

Nick Robins’ book on the world’s first transnational, “The Corporation That Changed The World”, exposes a side of Adam Smith conveniently left out of most free-market ‘invisible hand’ evangel.

“In Smith’s opinion, the joint stock corporation was a deeply flawed piece of public policy. A particular danger was the impetus for hazardous speculation created by separation of ownership and management in the joint stock arrangement… As a result, ‘negligence and profusion must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company’, simply becoming a vehicle for even more ..’malversion’.”

I think ‘malversion’ aptly describes the perverted and distorted form of the healing profession’s ethical mandate ‘to do no harm’, bent out of shape by moral zigzagging through corporate-profit minefield with a body count in the health insurance industry’s wake.

Another landmine exploded when we lost activist Melanie Shouse to the callous nature of an elitist for-profit health care system.

There is a thing called psychological numbing, which is a mental defense mechanism used to prevent psychological trauma. Denial.

People against health care choose to ignore these casualties on their face. Republicans offering deals that add a paltry 2 million to the health care rolls when 50 million are missing, are choosing to look the other way.

They are the priest and the Levite that pass by the beaten and robbed traveler.

As wiki says,

“A well-recognized situation of psychological numbing is that associated with killing another person. By being numb, the person refuses to recognize the implications of having killed the person, allowing their psyche, as it existed before, to continue as it was.”

We need to pass health care reform to save lives.

In the coming weeks, Congress will be transformed into a giant ER with tens of thousands of future victims lives hanging in the balance. It’s time to stop the talking points about ‘socialism’ and ‘government takeovers’ and face the fact that the unregulated private sector and free market profiteers, wallowing in monopolies and anti-trust, have enormously failed the American people.

What do we want? Health care.

When do we want it? Now.    

Melanie Shouse didn’t plan a memorial service so much as a memorial rally. And the last speaker, Amy Smoucha of Jobs with Justice, delivered a rousing call to action. She spoke about health care reform, but the core of her message could just as well apply to climate legislation, financial reform, or any other progressive cause. I’ve quoted maybe half of her talk below. I recommend watching all of it, both for inspiration and for information.

Smoucha started by likening Melanie’s attitude to Mother Jones’s: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.” After describing Melanie as generous and fierce in telling her personal, powerful story, Smoucha emphasized the importance of personal narratives:

“Her story has been so powerful and so compelling and so clear that her life is a beacon helping to guide the movement now throughout the country. So there is going to be a national march–and I didn’t do this, there’s no one in Missouri who did this–there’s going to be a national march that starts this week in Philadelphia. And folks are walking to DC and they’re calling it the Walk to the Finish Line for Melanie. (Applause) And for the most part, the people who are marching are people who, like Melanie, have their own stories–who have lost their loved ones, who themselves are uninsured or suffering with a pre-existing condition or are unable to afford care.

(…..)

So I’ve got some really important news. … Health care reform is not. dead. (audience member: “That’s right.” Applause.) But more than ever we need a disciplined movement and leaders and activists who, just like Melanie did for many years, stay on message, always show up and always be ready to fight. That’s what we need for the next few months. So John Prine has this folk song that I really love, where it’s like ‘blow up your teevees, throw away your papers.’ Blow up your teevees, throw away your papers and just fight for health care reform. Don’t listen to everybody trying to disorganize us. We’re closer to comprehensive health care reform than we’ve ever been in the history of this country. I also want to be very clear. We’re also closer to losing than we’ve been in the history of this fight, and that’s because Congress is stressed  out. They’re afraid of the election and they’re paralyzed because there’s mistrust between the House and the Senate.

At a national level, the president himself is calling them together trying to organize Congress, trying to organize the House and the Senate to come up with a firm plan to get this done, to get comprehensive heath care reform to the president’s desk.

So here’s what our job is. The president’s organizing Congress to … Here’s what we have to do: two things. We have to keep the yes votes in Missouri’s congressional delegation. And we have to poke at the no votes. All … as it comes down to the final moments of this struggle, all the powerful forces–those insurance companies, those for-profit corporations–are going to be trying to peel off votes and turn votes. We have to be vigilant in keeping our Missouri delegation on the side of our families, on the side of comprehensive health care reform. That’s the role that we have. The other thing we have to do is educate and mobilize the public–talk to our friends, talk to our families, talk to our co-workers. I know we’re tired. I know this has been a long fight. But we have to create a huge buzz around: health care reform must get done, a bill must go to the president’s desk

So ask your pastor to pray for the uninsured and for those who are struggling with medical debt at services. Call in to talk shows. And call your congressperson daily until a bill lands on the president’s desk.

Very quickly, the basis for reform is the Senate bill. That bill has to get passed by the House. Then it can go to the president’s desk and become law. We’re one House vote away from health care reform that is the most sweeping legislation that will ever have been passed in this country. In addition, there are some fixes that can be put into a separate bill and can pass through the House and go to the Senate. And all it needs is a simple majority.  (inaudible) So there is a path. There is hope. Don’t let all the naysayers cloud your mind.

What’s in the Senate bill? I’m only gonna tell you that in all the years that I’ve done this and in my three years in this fight, I never expected to get reform as far reaching and comprehensive as what’s in the Senate bill alone. Even before we fix it.”

At 7:30 in the video, Smoucha begins listing what the Senate bill has that she is so proud of. She finishes that list at the beginning of the second video and concludes:

“All of these are things that we have to fight for. And if this bill wouldn’t land on the president’s desk, it would take us years and years and millions of dollars to try to get piece by piece. All of those things are one House vote away from becoming law. One House vote. (…) All of these significant victories have powerful opponents and that’s why this bill has been so fiercely attacked. So Melanie wanted a political rally (inaudible), so the call to action: in her honor and memory, each of us must make passing comprehensive health care reform a daily task until the bill is on the president’s desk. We must call Congress daily. We have to create such a mandate and buzz that Congress reallizes the dire political consequences if they walk away with nothing. If they walk away from this opportunity without a bill, without any changes to our health care system that significantly advance the situation we find ourselves in, then Congress should be afraid to come home. (Applause)

Smoucha listed two events in St. Louis this week and the march from Philly to DC that begins Sunday the 21st and ends on the 24th, the day of Obama’s summit on health care. She urged everyone to sign the lists on the clipboards in the foyer so they could get up to date e-mails about events. Here’s how you can sign up to get the most current information:

Local events are at this site.

The march on DC info is here.

The two local events this week are:

Wednesday, the 17th, at 4:00: a rally outside the Wellpoint offices at 18th and Chestnut. Melanie spoke at two rallies there and tried to speak to Wellpoint officials, who were afraid to let her inside to talk to them. We’re going back a third time on her behalf.

Friday, the 19th, at 11:30: a rally at Shaw Park near S. Brentwood and Bonhomme in Clayton. Activists will build a monument to Melanie and others like her who have suffered at the hands of our broken system. Please bring items for the memorial-pictures, notes, mementos, flowers, and items to honor our loved ones.  NOTE:  You will not get items back.  They will become part of the memorial.

Dress warmly for both of these. They’re outside.

If you can’t make these events, you can still call your congresspeople. Because that is how we can get health care reform.

By the way, John Prine’s song, which has always been one of my favorites too, isn’t actually about health care reform.

In her opening remarks at the memorial service for Melanie Shouse, Rabbi Susan Talve got laughter and a round of applause when she said that there were activists working the foyer with clipboards before the service started. “That’s how we know Melanie’s here.” Talve meant that only metaphorically, of course, because the next thing she said was: “Hard to believe she’s not here. I don’t know anybody who showed up more than Melanie Shouse.”

It was the unscripted theme of the day. Every speaker alluded to Melanie’s determination and promised to carry on for her. Barbara Finch, of Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice, said that Melanie thought fast, talked fast, and walked fast. Then Finch spoke to Melanie’s mom: “Your Melanie did not give up and neither will we.”

Fellow activist Kathy Geldbach was impressed with the breadth and depth of Melanie’s knowledge on political issues and with her concern, not just for abstract issues, but for the actual people in  her life.

Ramona Williams echoed the awe each speaker expressed for Melanie’s determination: “She got the president elected, I’ll tell you. If there is such a thing as someone can will something into existence, Melanie willed Barack Obama into the presidency of the United States.” And then Melanie used her determination to nudge and coax Ramona Williams into one political cause after another. Together they created a structure for taking on various interrelated problems in North St. Louis City and County. Even though Melanie is gone, Williams concluded by saying: “So we’re gonna take the fight to the next level. It is on.

Various governmental entities will pay respect to Melanie: her suburb of Overland is calling Earth Day Melanie Shouse Day. St. Louis County Councilwoman Barbara Fraser read the Council’s statement honoring Melanie, and state rep Jake Zimmerman has introduced a resolution in the House to honor her. The most appropriate way to celebrate her activism, though, is by pressing the causes she sweated for. Jobs with Justice organizer Amy Smoucha, speaking last at the memorial service, delivered a call to action on health care reform. More about that on Tuesday.

Here’s a photo of Melanie–in younger, healthier days–with her partner of twenty years, Steve Hart.

Melanie Shouse’s traveling billboard is pictured at left.

Cancel that memorial service for Melanie Shouse next Sunday afternoon. She doesn’t deserve all the hoopla because, as several right wing bloggers have made clear, all she did was make a really, really stupid mistake in putting off a visit to the doctor when she found a lump on her breast.

Gateway pundit (ht: St. Louis Activist Hub) berates her for not getting one of the free breast exams offered by St. Anthony Hospital.

It’s just too bad this woman didn’t call St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Louis. They offer free breast exams to women who are in need of assistance. I suppose that’s Bush’s fault, too.

Yeah, Melanie. Why didn’t you do that? Oh wait. She’s gone, and we can’t ask her. But she’d probably offer some lame excuse like not knowing about that program. You know how those damn libruls are. They never get the right information, and then they try to blame somebody else for their own stupidity.

Another right winger, Flopping Aces, criticizes Melanie for choosing to open a new business rather than pay for her high deductibles.

[I]nstead of going to the doctor she instead dumped 30 grand into a business, one third of that could of [sic] paid the alleged deductible, then who is at fault here?

Not only does he have run on sentences, he has the chronology wrong. She spent thirty thou to open her new business and later, when her credit cards were maxed out, got sick. But let’s not nitpick. Surely you can see his point. She gambled with her life by not seeing a doctor. Yes, she would have faced bankruptcy by doing so, but, I mean, better bankrupt than dead, right?

She took a gamble and loss [sic].  It’s sad.  But to twist and spin this as if Socialism would of [sic] saved this woman’s life is absurd.

The wingoverse is out of patience with “Socialists” always whining that citizens of other countries don’t face the dire choice that Melanie did. The rightwing attitude is, get over it. She didn’t live in France; she lived in the good ole U.S.A. Melanie ought to have just admitted that the whole sad story was her own fault. We live in this great free country which offers excellent health care to … well, quite a few of us. Just thank the Almighty that we have the privilege of making our own decisions. Too bad she made the wrong one.

End of story. And shut up about health care reform.

Previous coverage of the Melanie Shouse story:

Death of an activist

Late healthcare activist Melanie Shouse tells her story

President Obama on Melanie Shouse: “How can I say to her, ‘You know what, we’re giving up’?”

Previously:

Late healthcare activist Melanie Shouse tells her story

Death of an activist

We just received the following transcript (excerpted):

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

__________________________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release                                             February 4, 2010

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

AND Q&A

AT DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE

FUNDRAISING RECEPTION

Capital Hilton

Washington, D.C.

6:15 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: ….And, yes, we are going to keep fighting to fix a health system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.  (Applause.)  Now, I — you heard me at the State of the Union — I didn’t take this on because it was good politics.  I love how the pundits on these cable shows, they all announce, “Oh, boy, this was really tough politically for the President.”  Well, I’ve got my own pollsters, I know — (laughter) — I knew this was hard.  I knew seven Presidents had failed.  I knew seven Congresses hadn’t gotten it done.  You don’t think I got warnings, “Don’t try to take this on”?  I got those back in December of last year.

So, yes, we knew this was hard.  But I took it on because families were at the mercy of skyrocketing premiums, soaring out-of-pocket costs, insurance companies that routinely deny coverage because of preexisting conditions, or see their insurance dropped altogether because they get sick.

We took it on because costs were closing small businesses.  They were keeping larger ones from competing on a level playing field.  They were eating into workers’ take-home pay.  They were canceling raises.  We took it on because it’s the single best way to bring down our deficits.  (Applause.)  By the way, nobody has disputed that.  When I was before the Republican caucus, it was very clear.  I said, look, you say you’re concerned about deficit reduction?  Nobody can dispute the fact that if we don’t tackle surging health care costs, that we can’t get control of our budget.  And by the way, the approach that we put forward would reduce our deficit by as much as a trillion dollars over the next two decades.

We took it on because every single day, 15,000 Americans join the tens of millions who don’t have health insurance — and every single year, 18,000 Americans die because of it.

I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer.  She didn’t have insurance.  She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed.  And she had fought a tough battle for four years.  All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it.  And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.  (Laughter.)

But think about this:  She was fighting that whole time not just to get me elected, not even to get herself health insurance, but because she understood that there were others coming behind her who were going to find themselves in the same situation and she didn’t want somebody else going through that same thing.  (Applause.)  How can I say to her, “You know what?  We’re giving up”?  How can I say to her family, “This is too hard”?  How can Democrats on the Hill say, “This is politically too risky”?  How can Republicans on the Hill say, “We’re better off just blocking anything from happening”?

That can’t be the message that the American people are delivering.  Yes, they’re nervous, they’re anxious, they’re in a tough time right now.  The thing they want most are jobs.  They really don’t like the process in Washington, the sausage-making.  That part I understand.  But I know that they don’t — but I know they don’t want to just offer nothing to the millions of people in America who are in the situation that that woman was in.  That’s what we campaigned on.  And we are going to keep on working to get it done — with Democrats and I hope with Republicans and everybody else in between — to bring down costs, to end the worst practices of the insurance industry, to finally give every American the chance to choose quality, affordable health care.  We are going to keep on working to get it done.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Yes we can!  Yes we can!  Yes we can!

THE PRESIDENT:  I am not going to walk away from these fights.  And I know you won’t — because you didn’t before.  You didn’t when folks were slamming doors in your faces — “Barama who?”  (Laughter.)  You didn’t quit when you heard voices saying we should scale back and throttle down and accept less.  You remember that.  When folks were saying our sights were set too high; that our faith in this country was misplaced; that our hope was naïve; that you couldn’t change Washington; that you had to accommodate yourself to the political realities.  You’ve all heard that.  You didn’t listen to those voices then — your voice proved them wrong.  You proved that nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices that are calling for change….

[emphasis added]

Update: The memorial service for Melanie has been changed from Saturday to Sunday. It is next Sunday, Feb. 13, 2:30, at Central Reform Congregation, 5020 Waterman.

Would it be too much to say that our broken health care system killed Melanie Shouse? No one could prove it in a court of law. But the system certainly drove her to put off seeing a doctor when she first discovered a lump on her breast, and the system too often put its profits ahead of treating her cancer. Last week, after being in treatment for four years, she died.

When she first noticed the tumor, she and Steve Hart, her business partner of eighteen years, owned Sweet Meat Stix. It was a small business that left them with few pennies to spare, so Melanie only carried catastrophic health insurance, which had a $5,000 deductible–what she called “‘hit by a bus kind of insurance'”. That constituted a huge sum for a struggling entrepreneur, so she put off seeing a doctor. Meanwhile the breast cancer grew. And metastasized. By the time she saw a doctor, she said, “‘I could have been diagnosed from across the street. It wasn’t a surprise.'”

Because she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she was eligible to be on Medicare. But that took two years to kick in. Meantime, she became too weak to work and had to go on Medicaid. The Suburban Journal wrote an article about her last September, which included this information:

Shouse is now on her third round of chemotherapy to fight off the bone cancer and liver tumors. That treatment did not keep her from becoming bedridden for a month this spring. She was then given Avastin, a biologic therapy that costs $6,500 for a two-week supply. Since then she has been able to keep food down and “get off the couch.” Her insurance provider has since sent her a letter saying it won’t pay for Avastin.

“The insurance bureaucracy shouldn’t stand between me and my doctor and treatment,” Shouse said. “Like they know more than a world-renowned oncologist.”

The last time I saw her was at a rally outside Lacy Clay’s office in mid-November. She was wearing an eye patch because of the cancer. She joked that it made her look like a pirate, and she liked that because she preferred looking dangerous to the opposition. Here’s the video I posted of her inveighing against the obstacles to reform–in the persons of Congressional Republicans:

“These prehistoric creatures are known for acting only on short-sighted, self interested greed in the service of powerful interests which refuse to relinquish the impunity they have enjoyed over the last six decades.”

She spoke from firsthand knowledge about how deadly that impunity is.

Another health care activist, LaDonna Applebaum, recounts seeing Melanie at a planning meeting in October for a candlelight vigil. Melanie wanted to stop with the nicey-nice vigils and go more outrageous, the better to get the media to pay attention. She suggested dressing up for Halloween in death costumes to illustrate what health insurance companies are doing to people like herself. That idea was nixed by some at the meeting as being insensitive to people currently struggling with terminal illness. They had a point, but as one of the doomed, Melanie was less concerned about offending the ill than about fending off the same fate for others.

Melanie paired that feisty outlook with depth of knowledge. She wasn’t just a cancer patient at Siteman Cancer Center, for example. She was, in her way, a researcher about cancer. She attended an annual symposium on the subject, last year traveling to San Antonio with oncologists from Siteman. Her friend and fellow activist, Kathy Geldbach, says her house is filled with boxes of research–about cancer, about factory farming, about proper nutrition, about renewable energy.

Steve says that their company sells 12 inch beef kabobs made from humanely raised cattle. Melanie hated what factory farming was doing to the environment and made sure that the product she and Steve sold was top quality. He joked: “Everything she did was top quality. I’m not sure how she ended up with me.” Like Kathy, he saw how involved Melanie was in learning. He says she watched health care hearings on C-Span and told anyone who was interested that the Republicans conducted 112 filibusters in the 2009 Congressional session.

But she’s gone. She faced the inevitable by planning her memorial service with the help of Rabbi Susan Talvi of Central Reform Congregation. Melanie chose to be cremated, wearing her Obama t-shirt. The memorial service will be at Central Reform Congregation, 5020 Waterman in St. Louis, on Saturday, February 13 at 3:00; and Melanie wanted those who attend to wear their activist t-shirts.

LaDonna has done something else that Melanie would approve of. She has sent e-mails to Claire McCaskill and President Obama about Melanie’s death. In an e-mail to local activists, LaDonna wrote: “I hope anyone reading this will call their lawmakers and scream that the Health Care bill is not dead but our dear friend is. I know Melanie wants us to keep fighting as she did.”

Please make those calls.