I’d not heard anyone talking about single-payer health care at the state level until I walked door-to-door with Sherry Stanley for a profile story that I wrote about her during her campaign for the 25th District seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1997.
All these years later, with much of her free time spent in the health-care reform effort locally and on Capitol Hill, Stanley is back where she started, pushing a single-payer state-level program as the next step given that she isn’t feeling what you’d call positive about where the health-care reform debate is going at the national level right now.
“There are days when you can feel terribly discouraged, because it impacts everything,” said Stanley, the field director for the 20th District House campaign of Democrat Erik Curren. “We just never have the piece peace of mind. Single-payer is a point of national pride in Canada. You can get on to taking care of other things in life. People don’t have to live life with the uncertainty over health insurance hanging over their heads. If they lose their jobs, they don’t have to worry about breaking their leg the next day and going bankrupt.”
“Things look bleak” for the reform effort in Washington right now, admitted Stanley, though she isn’t surprised to see how the debate has started to take shape, with Democrats, as they did in 1993, dividing amongst themselves over how exactly the reform should shake out.
“People are upset that Mark Warner, for example, is not supporting single-payer. Mark Warner has never, ever given anyone the slightest hint of possibility that he would support probably even a public option. I just think people don’t pay close enough attention to what their candidates are saying,” Stanley said.
Even President Barack Obama is a different beast than the Obama who as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004 backed a single-payer health-care system. Stanley said she saw Obama change his tune on single-payer during a televised debate with Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Party primaries last year when Clinton hit Obama hard on his support for single-payer.
“Something happened at that moment that you could see etched in his face. I thought when it happened, If it was ever going to happen with him, it isn’t going to happen now,” Stanley said.
Stanley, as you might have noticed, is quite critical of the Obama administration’s handling of the reform debate.
“We keep talking about Obama’s plan. He doesn’t have a plan. He has a set of guiding principles, but we’re not debating a plan,” Stanley said. “People are angry about the way the opposition is doing what it’s doing. I don’t get too caught up in what the opposition is doing. We can only control what we’re doing. And right now we have senators and congressmen getting beaten up over this because they’re having a hard time answering people’s questions because the plans are still just too vague.”
Stanley reserves her strongest criticisms for centrist Democrats like Warner and Fifth District Congressman Tom Perriello.
“The problem is we keep electing these centrist Democrats,” Stanley said. “I knew they wouldn’t support it. The truth of the matter is that Democrats tend to hear what they want to hear from their candidates rather than what they are really saying.
“What we need to do is call these Blue Dogs home and give them an earful, and if they don’t listen, call them home permanently,” Stanley said.
– Column by Chris Graham
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