Forum focuses on benefits of health care reform

Health care reform is the law now, but it still felt as if supporters were campaigning Tuesday as they discussed the benefits of the initiative at a forum in Philadelphia.

The new law will lead to better, cheaper, and more secure medical coverage, speakers told an enthusiastic crowd liberally salted with union T-shirts and gray hair at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia at 21st and Chestnut Streets.

John Dodds, executive director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, got loud applause when he praised the bill. "We did it," he said of passing the bill. "I think it's just as important that we maintain it. We have a lot of people that want to roll this back."

The forum was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, a coalition of groups that advocates for good insurance and help for the uninsured, and Families USA, a consumer group that supported health reform.

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat who supported the reform bill, also spoke. He did not mention his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Sestak, who discussed his daughter's and late father's health problems, said the health bill means more people will have insurance, so that uninsured parents of children with cancer won't have to worry about whether their kids can get good care. Medical payments will be tied to quality instead of just volume of services, a change he thinks might have helped his father avoid a postsurgical infection.

The bill will help individual patients, he said, but it also will lead to a healthier workforce and stronger businesses. "It is the right thing to have passed this for people," he said, "but it also is the right thing for the enterprise of America."

Kathleen Stoll, deputy executive director of Families USA, said some of the bill's most important provisions will prevent discrimination against people who already have health problems, provide tax breaks for small businesses and families making less than $88,000, make it easier to insure young adults and to shop for private health insurance, and expand the Medicaid program. The bill also caps out-of-pocket expenses for subscribers and requires that 80 percent to 85 percent of insurance company budgets go directly to health care.

It will eventually close the much-maligned doughnut hole in Medicare drug coverage, which requires recipients to pay for medicines themselves after they've reached a certain threshold of expenses.