You Are at the Root of Healthcare Reform

By Elisa Behnk

On a recent Sunday morning, around a dining room table in Eastern Maryland, a dozen AOM students, practitioners, and allopathic colleagues sat down to a potluck brunch. The topic soon turned to healthcare. It was no accident; this group convened expressly to respond to the Obama transition team’s request for new perspectives on current healthcare concerns and possibilities for the future.

Like the organized “meet-ups” the Obama campaign encouraged and facilitated in the months leading up to the election, grassroots groups are now meeting post-election to develop concerted feedback for the new administration. Specifically, the transition web site change.gov posed three questions:

1. What is the biggest problem with healthcare in the U.S. today?
2. What is the best way for policy makers to develop a plan to develop a sound healthcare policy?
3. What additional input and information would best help you to continue to participate in this great debate?

“We’re lucky,” said Deborah Hardin, MAc, a recently licensed practitioner and graduate from Tai Sophia Institute, who helped bring the Maryland group together. “In school we’re exposed to ideas outside the medical mainstream. We’re already asking, ‘What is the picture of health we want to promote in our community and the larger world?’”

With this in mind, the group’s focus during the meeting was as much on personal responsibility as it was on general ideas for the Obama team. Chris Fadgen, another recent Tai Sophia acupuncture graduate and co-host of the Maryland group, asked attendees to consider, “What’s one thing I take responsibility for and will go out into the community to do?”

Individual responses varied from focusing on pro bono acupuncture treatments in community health settings to creating childcare and eldercare environments that promote health in keeping with AOM principles.

“A number of people around the table said that they’d like to keep the momentum going, and to meet again, perhaps on a monthly or quarterly basis,” Fadgen said.

Halfway across the country in Minnesota, another group of fifteen participants met in early January as an “Alternative Healthcare Forum.” The demographics of this gathering were remarkably different.

“I wanted to have a group that didn’t know much, if anything, about alternative health,” said AAAOM-SO President Jolene Habeck, acupuncture student at Minnesota College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, NWHSU, in Bloomington Minnesota. “I wanted a group that hadn’t formed a specific opinion. If they had tried an alternative treatment, I wanted to find out why they sought it, how it affected them, and if they still use it.”

This group concluded that people do have a desire to discuss healthcare, but do not have an outlet. “It was surprising,” said Habeck, “because while the group was widely divergent socio-economically, it was not confrontational. It was a great way to realize that we’re all on the same page when it comes to illness. We all have the same needs, no matter where we live and what our background is,” Habeck concluded.

AAAOM-SO encourages AOM students and practitioners to engage in this feedback process by hosting or attending a grassroots healthcare policy discussion in your area. Click here to join a discussion thread on the AAAOM forum website and announce or find a group in your area. Then, share your individual and collective perspectives with the new administration through change.gov.