This week, I ramped up my “man/woman on the street” approach to reporting on health reform. I’m finding there are many bureaucratic hurdles to go through at institutions such as health centers and hospitals (as soon as I take out my tape recorder, one of the “administrators” will descend upon me and ask me to turn it off pending approval, etc.), so I’m trying to just cruise the streets of Holyoke and talk to people I meet. It’s not a bad way to report, actually.

This week, I walked into Nuestras Raices on Main Street in Holyoke. It’s a community organization that focuses on food and community. The first person I met there, Jim Santiago, is development director. Before he got this job, he was a real estate broker. He was eligible for commonwealth care for him and his wife, but after the real estate market tanked, he couldn’t afford the $140 a month copay ($70 per person.) So he simply stopped paying the premiums. (He’s one of the “defaulters” — a population the state doesn’t advertise when they talk about the “newly insured.”) He started incurring penalties, but then he found the job at N.R. That nonprofit pays the entire premium for its employees, which is frankly quite rare in the corporate world, never mind the nonprofit world.

I then met a woman named Laura, who works in the same complex for Holyoke Food and Fitness. She’s got insurance through the job, but her boyfriend — a housepainter — has no health insurance because it’s too expensive. He’s choosing to ignore the law for now, but she’s worried — not only about the financial penalties, but about what could happen if he gets hurt. She says he sees himself as young and healthy — which he is — but she worries about him falling off a ladder or having some other workplace accident.
I then walked into Mi Plaza — a small restaurant staffed mostly by Spanish speaking employees. My Spanish wasn’t at its best, but I managed to suss out that most of the staff gets MassHealth. However, when I spoke one of the owners/investors, he told me the restaurant buys health insurance for its employees as a result of the law. I’m not sure he was right’, since the employees said differently. He also said that he gets his own health insurance from his other job — working in “law enforcement”. (wouldn’t say where — might be a jail.)

Next door on Main Street, I met Betty Medina Lichtenstein. As it happens, she had long been on my list of people to contact. She’s a community leader and director of the group, Enlace de Familias. As soon as I told her I was doing a story on health reform, she assumed I had heard about her personal situation. Turns out her nephew — who she raised — has racked up $900 in health bills that she assumed would be covered by Commonwealth Care. She has signed him up for the program because he is income eligible, but as soon as the program learned that he was attending Holyoke Community college, they said he didn’t qualify for CommCare. She was just running out and didn’t have time for an interview, though…. We arranged to meet the next week, but she cancelled. Turns out her organization has been the victim of state budget cuts; she just laid off one of her three staff members; and she’s hustling to apply for grants to keep the organization going. In other words, she’s feeling too overwhelmed to do an interview on healthcare. I am hoping she reconsiders, but I’ll give her a few weeks to get her bearings.

And lastly…..I stopped at the video store in Northampton on my way home. I was chatting to Bill Dwight working behind the counter, and told him I was hoping to find someone who’s a “positive” example of health reform, someone who’s getting health insurance but wouldn’t have without the new law. “Like me!” said the woman renting a DVD right next to me. She’s a local artist who says many of her artist friends were also able to get CommCare. I immediately wrote down her information, and plan to call her after Thanksgiving.