Deb Richter: A Cure for Broken Health Care
Email
Print
Feed
Share-
HOW TO BREAK THROUGH:
“I never felt like I had a choice about getting involved in this struggle … I couldn’t stop and I never will.”
Dr. Deb RichterPhoto by Kurt Budliger.
Meet 15 Extraordinary People Transforming the Way We Live
Deb Richter resolved to fix the health care system almost as soon as she began practicing medicine more than two decades ago in inner-city Buffalo. “I was very naive, I guess,” recalls Richter. “A lot of my patients didn’t have insurance. I would prescribe medicines for patients but they wouldn’t be able to afford them, and then they would just get sicker. I was mortified.”
It was the tragedy of a brother and sister who had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that brought things sharply into focus. “They kept up with their insulin and needles, but they often couldn’t afford the 50-cents-apiece test strips when they didn’t have insurance,” says Richter. By the time they became her patients, the siblings were in bad shape. The boy lost his vision, his health declined, and he died at 21. His sister had a fatal heart attack at 25.
Richter realized that she was facing a turning point. “I didn’t want to change where I practiced just so I wouldn’t have to witness this. I knew I couldn’t continue to practice if this situation continued. I didn’t want medicine to just be for wealthy people.”
Selected by the YES! Editors: “She packed up and moved her life and family so she could push for the only health care solution that makes sense to us: single-payer health care.” —Madeline Ostrander
Instead of hanging up her stethoscope, she joined Physicians for a National Health Program, a leading doctors’ group that advocates for universal health care coverage with just one insurance provider—the government. “What they had to say made sense to me—24 percent of health care was spent on paperwork and transaction costs. Other countries didn’t spend that.” She eventually served as the group’s president.
Richter became convinced that the likeliest route to a national single-payer system would be state by state. She and her husband and two young boys moved to Vermont in 1999, where they bought a house just two blocks from the statehouse in Montpelier. It suited a physician-activist who was raising a family. “I could testify before the legislature and walk home to do the laundry.”
Richter kept up her medical practice three days a week, while lobbying for a single-payer system the other two days. She cornered politicians, wrote editorials, spoke to Rotary clubs, and gave hundreds of talks. In 2005 the legislature passed a major health care reform bill, but the governor vetoed it. “That was one of my lowest points,” recalls Richter. Work and advocacy were taking up all her time. “I was hardly seeing my family. If we couldn’t get it done in Vermont, where was it ever going to work?”
Then Vermont voted in Governor Peter Shumlin, who recognized that skyrocketing health care costs had reached a crisis point for businesses and the middle class. The iconoclast Vermont politician Bernie Sanders moved from the U.S. House to the Senate, and was in a more powerful position to clear roadblocks at the federal level. Grassroots advocates focused their energies, as did Richter. This May, Vermont became the first state in the nation to pass a single-payer health care plan.
Richter is proud of the achievement, even though she concedes that Vermont’s health care bill is not quite comprehensive and could still get derailed before it’s fully enacted over the next six years. She continues giving public talks, shepherding the Vermont bill and lobbying for a national health care plan, as well as practicing medicine.
“This will be an enormous change for people without insurance,” says Richter of the Vermont bill, which will guarantee every resident an essential health benefit package from birth. “Now that we have this in Vermont, we need to make sure it happens everywhere.”
Daniel Fireside wrote this article for The YES! Breakthrough 15, the Winter 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Daniel Fireside is the Capital Coordinator at Equal Exchange
Interested?
- Cuba's Cure
By investing in health care that is holistic and focuses on prevention, Cuba has created one of the most effective systems in the world. Cuban doctors are engaged in missions throughout poor parts of the world, exchanging medical know-how for positive diplomatic relations. - Health Care Economics 101
When it comes to health care, everyone can't have everything right away. But we can make smarter choices that don't leave anyone out in the cold. - Vermont’s Bill: Is it Single-Payer Health Care?
A question and answer session with Dr. Ida Hellander helps demystify Vermont's new health care bill.
That means, we rely on support from our readers.
||
SUBSCRIBE ||
GIVE A GIFT ||
DONATE ||
Independent. Nonprofit. Subscriber-supported.
Affordable Health Care
{1) Get the lawyers out medical care. Presently you can not sign away liability so if the doctor, therapist, nurse errors they will be sued. I want that waiver choice to lesson the overall cost of premiums. Presently doctors perform numerous expensive procedures and tests to satisfy legal requirements rather than medical on the remote chance they may be sued in this litigious society we live in. Insurance cost for a medical professional is prohibitive as a result. Choose your doctor wisely and trust him, you can always change if you can not communicate sadly people are aware that they control their own health not the clinician. No health treatment is without risk and no doctor, therapist or nurse errors intentionally. I like to believe they all do their best which is all anyone should ask.
(2) Trusting your health to a company that is profit driven is idiocy unfortunately there are few other options. To cite an example I am all too familiar with is therapeutic care. A therapist faces ethical dilemmas every day as a result of company pressure to make a profit at the expense of a person’s health. Group therapy substituting for individual care which is what you are paying for or a token measure of time rather than the allowable hour. Unnecessary therapy sessions are performed to maximize profits often using your Medicaid / Medicare / Insurance caps and monies depriveing funds for later in the year or treatment in the continuation of care.
(3) Too many specialist doctors interested in a perpetual caseload rather than ending medical procedures when possible. It is very profitable for them and costly to for you in time and insurance premiums. This abuse is often unnecessary and at times risky.
(4) Spread reimbursement more evenly top to bottom. Pay the employees more providing daily care so more and better skilled people will join the profession. One CNA over an 8 hour shift which quite normal equates to less than 15 minutes per. Doctors may be overpaid but certainly the opposite end of the spectrum is underpaid.
(5) Charge the actual cost for a medical procedure to all patients. For example: A hospital will charge the uninsured $20,000 while the insurance company pays $2,000. Be equal and fair with the cost of care and maybe some procedures can be paid out of pocket if necessary.