A Widow Paints A Health Care Protest

As Congress debates health care overhaul, Regina Holliday is using her paintbrush to take on the current medical system. Her 50-foot-long mural depicts the problems her family encountered while her husband was fighting stage IV kidney cancer.

See and hear the rest of the story at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120028213

Credit: Jason Orfanon, Joe Shapiro, Maggie Starbard

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• regina holliday
• cancer
• kidney
• npr
• health care
• overhaul

[voyeurdug]

The work is ~just~ well begun... there's a lot more to get it through the Senate... and after that through conference... then implementing it... which will take years.

What the average person can do to make this happen is easy: Write to your Senators.  Paper, ink, envelope stamp... and your own words... not a script from one or another side's political or economic pressure group... and send it... and ask your friends and family to do likewise... and so forth and so on... on and on. Do it.

[franknblunt]

I just hope that the politicians don't weaken the reform. Exemptions, subsidies, and other consolations to insurers and the like that are responsible for the soaring costs among other problems with medicine in the USA.

But they will.

Consider that weapons expenditures such as the 2010 Defense budget, for one year has increased 25% to $680 billion! I know much of that is for unneeded programs and waste. The priorities are strange and seemingly callous.

[gadionson1]

very sad experience.. Im praying for their fast recovery

[catoose19]

@SinnFein4ever Moving to Canada isn't an answer. When you are fighting cancer, there is no time for stalls. The insurance companies stall, hoping to delay paying for expensive treatment, and cancer doesn't wait. I know people who were delaying in getting treatment in Canada. Like Regina, I lost my husband less than 3 months after diagnosis, and it was a game with the insurance company, and we lost. And the men in suits were probably proud of themselves for it. It is despicable.

[SinnFein4ever]

She and her husband should have moved to Canada.

At least there, the government is required by law to provide proper medical care to everyone, and medications are much cheaper (the Canadian government has laws limiting how much a drug company or pharmacy can charge for perscription medications).

He might have lived.

[franknblunt]

Please do that for the VA. Reform should start there and at military treatment facilities.

[tooosweeet]

She should have sanded down the wall and used a larger brush... I wonder how many brushes she went through painting that on that surface...

[arequipa1]

i'm not sure what you're asking me to make peace with.

[DreamerM]

@arequipa1 then you want people who could be saved to continue to die. You don't think it's proper that someone can "not afford" to live.

Realize that. Make peace with it.

[arequipa1]

yes, i've done it.

i've told my representatives NOT to allow this monstrosity to go through.