HOW WINNING IS DONE

by Paul Gibbs

The past week has been a discouraging one for me in terms of the progress of Healthy Utah. First, after a meeting of the Health Reform Task Force which I found surprisingly encouraging, co-chairs Jim Dunnigan and Allen Christensen made statements which somehow pulled of the amazing trick of baffling me without surprising me (at least in Christensen's case). Instead of getting from the revelation of the increased size of the coverage gap that there were far more people than we realized who needed help, they jumped to a dubious conclusion that it made the expansion far more costly. This fits the way they've been reacting all along, showing far more concern for tax dollars than for the lives and well-being of the people of Utah. But I still can't wrap my head around that point of view. I don't see how people can see tens of thousands of people obviously in need and not have helping them at the front of their minds. I really can't. And talk of fiscal responsibility makes no sense when we consider how much Utah spends on everything from containing wolves to investigating former Attorneys General to multi-million dollar appeals of federal court decisions that even Orrin Hatch acknowledges they have no hope of winning. Utah's frugality seems to only apply to helping the poor.

Then came the conflicting federal court decisions regarding the ACA, wherein one court determined that the federal government couldn't offer subsidies in states that hadn't set up exchanges, and the other determined they could. We saw partisan politics at its worst here, with the same conservatives who decry "judicial activism" when 20 some odd judges across the country make decisions completely in tune with each other and legal precedent now praise a conservative court for jumping on a glorified typo to contradict other courts decisions. Then Dunnigan and Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart responded by saying that this complicates the Medicaid issue in Utah, with Lockhart saying it would be "unwise" to accept the federal funding at this time, and Dunnigan seeming to think this kills the idea of a special legislative session before next January's general session. It strikes me as unlikely that the anti-ACA decision will hold up, but again we see that Utah's conservative legislators (who claim to believe, as I do, in "obeying and sustaining the law") just want to strike a blow against the Obama administration's signature achievement. In Lockhart's case this is so expected that it's barely worth noting, but Dunnigan has struck me in the past as more reasonable, and I really thought we'd reached him to at least a degree with the excerpt from Entitled to Life and the testimonies of those struggling in the coverage gap. Perhaps I'm being naive, but I'm generally somewhat surprised by his reaction to these events.

So, where does this leave us? Well, at least ahead of where we were a few months ago. However much the legislators want to ignore it, it's become clear that the people of Utah overwhelmingly favor the Healthy Utah version of expansion. We gained a  lot of momentum in June and the first half of July, and I believe we can sustain it. I've decided to conduct more interviews with people in the coverage gap, either to release as stand alone segments or for a second Entitled to Life short film. Stacy Stanford and I will continue to seek after stories from coverage gap nationwide, and I hope to team with MoveOn.org to tell those stories. And I guarantee that my friends at Utah Health Policy Project and Voices For Utah Children will keep working tirelessly. We're not going to let people suffer and die because of the pettiest of partisan politics. And we need you to take the same stand. Keep emailing legislators. At least one a week. Don't ever let them forget that the pressue is on them to serve the people they were elected to represent.

Keeping in mind that I'm usually a filmmaker/critic, not a political activist, I'm going to give the last word today to the title character in Rocky Balboa, with a quote that helped my Mom when she was battling a series of strokes, and helped me during my kidney failure:  Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!