Action alerts
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Fishermen interested in helping place booms to try to stop the Gulf Oil Spill should call: (425) 745-8017
2009 National Health Care Reform:
Community Based Outreach for Fishermen, Farmers, and Ranchers
Request:
National health care reform legislation should include community based health care outreach, enrollment assistance, and medical education funding for hard to reach and rural workers, including: fishermen, farmers, and ranchers.
Problem:
The majority of Americans receive their healthcare coverage through employer groups. This system is funded through taxpayer dollars because compensation paid in the form of healthcare benefits is not taxed. Employers invest in their workers by establishing human resources departments that guide their employees through the complicated process of accessing the benefit programs that they sponsor.
There is no analogous investment in human capital for hard to reach and rural populations, such as: fishermen, farmers and ranchers.
Solution:
Since 1997, the Fishing Partnership Health Plan (FPHP) has served a hard to each, rural population: Massachusetts commercial fishing families. The FPHP hires community members, fishermen and fishermen’s wives, to provide healthcare outreach, enrollment assistance, and to support medical education for the unique population that they serve.
The FPHP outreach workers staff offices in the port towns, they know how to reach the fishermen, and they speak the language of the fishermen, both literally (Italian and Portuguese) and figuratively. They are the ideal people to guide their constituents through the confusing process of applying for health care coverage.
The FPHP’s community based outreach is effective and highly efficient. For example, the FPHP he FPHP has been able to keep marketing costs low by avoiding traditional advertising and depending on the outreach workers to promote the Plan.As a result, the FPHP’s administrative costs (13% of revenue) are less than half the administrative costs of comparable plans.
In addition, the FPHP outreach workers are advocates for the community that they serve. The outreach workers facilitate the distribution of existing public and private funding to the appropriate sources. For example, when the Northeast groundfish fishery was declared a natural disaster, the outreach workers were called upon to distribute federal disaster relief. Furthermore, the FPHP outreach workers coordinate with private fishing industry specific foundations, such as the Shaw’s Fund for Mariners’ Children, to support the healthcare needs of fishing families during this difficult time.
The FPHP’s community based outreach is a model for providing the country’s hard to reach and rural workers with the same outreach, assistance and medical education that most employees have come to expect from their employers’ human resources departments.
What You Can Do to Help this Year
Tell your representatives and senators in Congress: “Healthcare coverage for fishing families is the #1 need shared by every fishing family in the entire nation. Don’t forget to provide targeted resources for outreach and education for fishermen so fishing families will get the quality coverage they deserve.” For more information on how you or your organization can help promote the goal of high-quality healthcare coverage for all fishing families, please contact The Fishing Partnership Health Plan:
Fishing Partnership Health Plan
1383 Washington Street
Newton, MA 02465
Telephone: (617) 928-3443
Toll Free: (866) 661-FPHP
Fax: (617) 928-3445
RESOURCES:
Click here to find the address, fax and email address for your SENATORS.
Click here to find the address, fax, and email address for your REPRESENTATIVE.
Read about the history of fisherman’s healthcare. (PDF: 120 KB)
Click here for more information
Health Reform for Fishermen
We need every fishing, farming, and ranching family to call their Senators and Congressmen today and tell them that our families need them to pass health reform, now. Please call the Capitol Switchboard at 1-888-797-8717 and ask for your US Representative or Senator (you can look up your elected officials here: www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/officials/ ). If you have any doubts about making this call, please read on.
Fishing, farming, and ranching families need comprehensive health reform to pass. Now. Eighty percent of uninsured Americans are from working families. The health care system is failing these families, and we are all paying for this breakdown. The uninsured pay with their lives. Over 275,000 American adults will die because of lack of health insurance in the next decade if health reform does not pass. Another study shows that 17,000 children died over the prior decade because they did not have health care coverage. How many of these deaths come from the fishing industry? Too many. Fishing families are 3-4 times more likely to go without health care coverage.
And, the nation pays through lost productivity, cost shifting, higher taxes, etc. Every person with insurance pays an extra $1,100 a year to cover the unpaid costs of the uninsured. The Institute of Medicine estimates that the high rate of uninsured Americans costs the United States $65 to $130 billion each year.
There is a lot of bad information out there about the health reform bill, but it is the best chance for fishing, farming, and ranching families to obtain access to health care coverage. Health care reform will ensure that individuals and small businesses, including fishermen, farmers, and ranchers, will have real health insurance options. When reform passes, insurance companies will need to offer good coverage. They will not be allowed to deny anyone coverage because they have a pre-existing condition and they will not be allowed to stop anyone’s coverage just because they become sick.
Here’s what the reform bill will not do. It will not increase the deficit. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the reform bill will reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next decade by cutting waste from the $2 trillion we already spend on healthcare each year. It will not be a government takeover. Health care reform will make private insurance affordable and easy to get. It will not be a partisan plan that is rammed through by one party. The bill has been debated for a year with over 100 bipartisan meetings and 79 bipartisan hearings. The Senate bill alone includes 147 Republican amendments that were accepted during these meetings.
We have been working with rural and hard to reach workers for fifteen years to try to get access to health care coverage for fishing, farming, and ranching families. We have never been as close to this goal than we are today. Unless there is comprehensive reform, fishing, farming, and ranching families will continue to fall through the cracks of the health care system. Please call your elected officials today to tell them that fishing, farming, and ranching families need health reform, now.
Previous Efforts:
Click here to see our open letter to Congress. (PDF: 108 KB)
