OPS Office Hours - Zoom Meeting - July 15, 2020

TUES., JULY 15, 4 – 6 PM PT/ 7 – 9 PM ET

Register in advance so you can drop on by for health care justice advocacy training, or just to network with other advocates from across the country working on achieving health care for all in their state, their region, and for the entire United States. Because we value your time, we ask that you send us your preferences for topics so we can more efficiently get you assigned to a breakout room.

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0uc-iqqj4iGtzv6BT8VA5kVNESyfEqYiqf

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Then send your email of preferences to Mike Huntington or to waittvt@gmail.com.

Only 100 people can participate. If you are unable to enter, please send an email to waittvt@gmail.com and tell us your name and state; what topics interest you; what kind of help you’d like; or how you wish to volunteer. Although we will not see emails during the OPS Office Hours, we will review them soon and make plans.

Schedule:

3:45 PM PT Start joining the Zoom for greeting and orientation.

4:00 Betty starts the meeting, outlines the evening session, and invites introductions. If you did not send your request in advance, please indicate your choice of break-out room in the chat bar.

4:30 Topics for July 15:

Funding a Universal Health Care System – Warren George. See more below.
Your questions about Single Payer, and how to respond to myths that opponents propagate – This will be a discussion format. Ideally, people sign up in advance so we can plan for enough volunteers to have groups of 6 or fewer. This would give participants who want practice answering questions more opportunity. Speaking the words yourself will help you solidify your knowledge and be a more effective advocate.
The third topic will be one of these:
1. Responding to COVID-19, including a quick tutorial on HR 6906
2. Reaching out to faith-based groups
3. Developing relationships with candidates and elected officials
If your organization is looking for help on getting town resolutions passed, on starting a Rapid Response team to write letters to the editor, or another tactic, let us know ASAP and we will try to line up someone with the advocacy skills to help your team.
If several people request another topic, we will try to put you together with another volunteer. This will work best if you let us know by Monday, Noon EDT.

5:45 Rejoin Main Room for closing conversation……………………………….Betty Keller

6:00 Adjourn

Making the best use of your time

Type your interests or your questions into the chat bar before or during the presentation to help direct conversation. Anything you type in the chat bar in a breakout room can only be seen within the breakout room. Anything you type in the chat bar in the main room can only be seen in the main room. After going into a breakout room and coming back to the main room, you can only see chats that occur after you rejoined. So if you want to save a chat before going to a breakout room, go to the three dots to the right of where you enter a message, and select “Save Chat.”

If you mostly want to network, it is OK to come for introductions to meet people, skip the first breakout session, and join a breakout session at 5:15 for networking.

If you only want to join for a topic, it is fine to show up at 4:20 so long as you registered and told Mike in advance what topic you wanted so he already has you going in there. And you are welcome to skip out afterward.

Funding a Universal Health Care System

Warren George is a semi-retired management consultant, and previous senior operating manager for one of Oregon’s largest manufacturing companies. His specialties in relation to health care reform are funding universal care, and broad based messaging. In 2019 he and a fellow business person commissioned one the highest rated pollsters to in America to perform a detailed study of how Oregon voters feel about funding Universal Care. Access the study at variedstrengths.com.

Warren’s breakout session for July 15th will be a primer level overview of the topics involved in funding. Without a viable funding plan, universal care is going nowhere, and yet there has been comparatively little work in this area to find the right funding plan that will meet with broad public support. Neither of the national Medicare for All bills have a funding plan.

This presentation, which will roughly follow an outline published by the Congressional Budget Office, will address the basic question, “How does one go about designing a funding plan for universal care?” Mr. George will compare various taxation options. He will give specific examples for how an Oregon state-based universal care system could be funded, but those examples will have relevance to other states as well as nationally. As time allows, follow-up discussion will look at national funding proposals by Robert Pollin, Gerald Friedman, and by the Elizabeth Warren campaign among others with an eye toward what those proposals do well, and what they do less well.

Tuesday, July 28, 4 – 6 PM PT/ 7 – 9 PM ET: OPS OFFICE HOURS

We are considering whether to focus the entire event on growing our movement and our diversity, if we can find strong leadership for this. Please send us recommendations!

If we offer multiple topics, one will be a basic introduction to how a universal, publicly-funded health care system works. This will be different from the presentation Betty did on user experience from patient, provider, and administrator perspectives.

Other topics might include those listed as possibilities for July 15, as well as Key Issues for State-Based Single Payer Legislation (with Bill Bronston facilitating). If you are interested in the Key Issues breakout room, please read these two documents in advance:

Policy Checklist

Sample preamble for state legislation

Hope to see you at one of these!

Betty Keller