by Angela J. Bass/OAKLAND

In the small basement auditorium of Children’s Hospital and Research Center Oakland, congressional leaders, healthcare policy experts and pediatricians, among others, spent Thursday morning in deep conversation over president-elect Barack Obama’s proposals for healthcare reform, and its likely impact on East Bay children and families.

Children's Hospital Oakland was the site of Thursday's national conversation on Obama's healthcare reform proposals.

The national town hall meeting began with a closed circuit broadcast from the National Press Club in Washington D.C. and was followed by a local panel discussion, during which pediatricians and healthcare advocates of Children’s Hospital Oakland put a local spin on the issues.

“In recent years, we’ve seen a lot more talk than action,” said D.C. discussion moderator and on-air health analyst on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Susan Dentzer, in her opening remarks. “Many here in Washington believe the time has come for a change in the U.S. healthcare system.”

Yet Thursday morning’s event, entitled “Proposals to Policy: A National Conversation on Health Care Reform,” proved that it’s not just the people in the nation’s capital, where many of the final decisions on reform will be made, that are eager to affect policy changes.

Crystal Gariano, a healthcare advocate and the administrative coordinator of the children’s neurosurgery department at Children’s Hospital Oakland, understands child healthcare issues and policy as both healthcare professional and parent. Her daughter, Ariel, is fighting a rare pediatric cancer known as rhabdomyosarcoma.

Gariano is fighting attitudes in the healthcare and general community that medical research, something Obama proposes alongside prevention, is too costly to be a good thing.

“If a portion of what we pay for gas actually went to healthcare plans, would people be more willing to pay up to $4 a gallon again?” she asked the audience of about 60 people. Many nodded their heads in agreement. “I’m hoping we can rely on [everyday] people to ensure that the things that need to happen for our kids’ health really does happen.

“It’s hard enough to fight a disease like pediatric cancer,” she continued. “It would be an absolute dream to think that healthy children who simply need flu shots and vaccinations could easily get them.”

Panel member James Hanson, M.D., Director of Pediatric Intensive Care at Children’s Hospital Oakland, challenged the notions of policymakers on Capitol Hill that socialized healthcare, like what exists in Canada, Sweden and England, wouldn’t work in the U.S. and offered ideas for how it could gradually be implemented.

“Why not let children’s hospitals experiment with creating a socialized healthcare system using the much cheaper health problems of children, then allowing the government to model an adult program after its successes and failures?” he probed.

Gariano agreed. “As an American, it’s unfathomable to have socialized healthcare, but if it’s possible to have it [in other countries], then it’s possible in this country.”

In both D.C. and Oakland conversations, panel members spoke optimistically about the cost of Obama’s proposed reforms, saying that research, cures and treatments, and disease prevention were worth the high costs, especially when it came to children. But not everyone in attendance spoke so fondly of the way money is used in the healthcare industry.

Event poster

Candice Bjornson, M.D. of Children’s, stood up from her seat in the audience criticizing the industry’s business model, saying it was too often concerned with turning a profit, rather than with helping people. “People’s illness should not create a profit to anyone,” she said. She also criticized the costly drug ads that fill the TV screens of millions of Americans who “think the butterflies in the Lunesta commercial mean the drug is safe” for them to use.

“We shouldn’t be putting out commercials to the public,” said Bjornsen. “Drug commercials should be directed at doctors so that the millions of dollars saved by not putting [commercials] out there can go towards lowering drug costs for the patient.”

An insistence on transparency, and direct involvement with the decisions made by policymakers, providers, payers and pharmas was an important topic towards the end of Thursday’s town hall. A related remark that Obama made on the issue early in his campaign struck a specific chord with Hanson.

“One of the things that really turned me into an Obama supporter was him saying that his way of dealing with healthcare would be to put all the stakeholders in one room and televise their conversation so the public can understand how these decision makers really feel” about the healthcare industry, explained Hanson.

Although the impact of Obama’s reform proposals is still largely uncertain, many seemed optimistic that it would improve relationships between employers, insurers, pharmas, policymakers and consumers. But ensuring health coverage for all children and most adults was a top concern for most of the panel and audience members.

“We at Children’s Hospital see those children without insurance,” said Gena Lewis, M.D., a physician and healthcare advocacy educator. “We feel everyday the need to provide coverage. We need to be noisy and ensure that these proposals really do happen.”

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