By BETTY RIDGE
While most people don’t think of health care reform when considering how to better the region’s economic status, two local lawmakers said Wednesday that’s one of the keys to improving the quality of life.
The regional economic summit, “Giving Voice to Our Region,” which concluded Wednesday at Northeastern State University, focused on making northeastern Oklahoma more competitive and, as a result, more successful in attracting businesses and quality jobs.
A wide range of speakers discussed working across geographical, political and party bounds to accomplish that goal. The conference was sponsored by NSU, the Cherokee Nation, and SACC-EZ (Sequoyah, Adair and Cherokee County Empowerment Zone).
But with health care one of the top national issues concerning Americans, it also was on the minds of people attending the summit, and speakers at the legislative breakfast Wednesday morning.
U.S. Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., and U.S. Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., appeared by teleconference from Washington, D.C., where much of their attention for the next week will focus on the House version of health care reform.
Both backpedaled rapidly from the Democrat version House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues announced last week, saying they would not support it.
During their presentation, Sullivan and Boren stressed how closely the Oklahoma delegation works together, with Boren the lone Democrat among its seven members.
“I joke about being the dean of the Oklahoma House delegation,” Boren quipped. “It’s a pretty small group. I look at the mirror and talk to myself.”
Boren and Sullivan agreed a bipartisan effort for health care reform, as well as addressing other national issues, is best. But in today’s political climate, they doubt that can occur.
“When I go back to Oklahoma, I don’t find too many people who care for the government takeover of our health care,” Sullivan said. “We need to reform our health system; we need to get costs down.”
He said the current proposal would cost small businesses $838 billion.
“This is not a way to grow an economy,” he said. “We’re pretty much agreed that we need to do this, but do it a different way.”
Sullivan said he has introduced an amendment to make the House bill better. It would require, in six months, an accounting of fraud, duplication of services and abuse, and their elimination.
Boren concurred, saying he expected the House bill to pass by Tuesday, without his, or Sullivan’s, vote in favor.
He said that at this point, health care is “a distraction,” and Congress needs to focus “more on job creation than all the other things going on.”
But he realizes the lack of sufficient access to affordable health care is a problem locally.
“In my district, 26 percent of our people are uninsured,” he said. “We have a lot of people who have pre-existing conditions who can’t get insured.”
However, he advised people at the conference to “focus like a laser beam on the economy.”
Their videoconference was followed by a live session with governmental officials from the Oklahoma Legislature, Cherokee Nation and one county commissioner. Tahlequah’s legislative representatives, both of whom have run small businesses, disagreed with the national lawmakers on the health care issue.
Sen. Jim Wilson, D-Tahlequah, and Rep. Mike Brown, D-Tahlequah, have both backed health care reform issues during their service in Oklahoma City. And both have admitted it’s an uphill battle against the insurance industry and its lobbyists.
“In the small business that I run, it used to be easy for me to afford my employee health coverage, 100 percent,” Brown said.
Those costs have skyrocketed, and now the employees must be responsible for much of the cost, reducing their spending capacity for other things.
“We give a lot of lip service to small businesses, but what we don’t do is legislate to take care of these businesses,” Wilson said. “We need public investment. That’s the key to everything.”
What’s killing small businesses right now, Wilson asked. He pointed to two specific factors: rising costs of health care and education.
Individual, out-of-pocket health care costs have gone up by $400 to $600 per year, he said. And tuition for higher education has gone up $300 to $500. With wages not rising proportionally, that’s quite a bit of money a family no longer has to spend on discretionary items. And it hurts the small businesses that sell those items, and the businesses that support them.
“These are dollars that aren’t available in the marketplace for your use,” Wilson said.
He said the median income in his district is $29,000, and that doesn’t provide a family with much money to buy extras – just necessities.
Wilson urged the audience members to take their government back.
“Right now, the people who have influence in Washington and in Oklahoma City are the lobbyists, and they work for the big businesses,” he said.
Small businesses and private citizens should organize in their interests.
“We cannot attract high-paying jobs in Oklahoma unless we have public investment, and in Oklahoma, we’re deciding not to do that,” Wilson said.
Tax cuts in recent years have come at the expense of public investment, and the average taxpayer hasn’t realized much from them — only about $57 per year, Wilson said.
“We can get our median wage up, but that’s going to take public spending,” he said. “Do you want a $57 tax cut, or do you want to widely improve the quality of life? I believe you can control the government, you can control the decision-making, but you’re going to have to do that. It isn’t going to just happen.”
Brown said people can accomplish things when they come together as a community, and that is what is needed to make things happen in this region.
During the earlier part of the presentation, Boren said he can be most effective if citizens come to him with specific, well-developed proposals, not just vague ideas about what they want to accomplish.
“First and foremost, it’s important to have a plan,” he said. “Use a rifle shot approach, rather than a shotgun approach.”
Sullivan also urged citizens to work directly with his office and bring ideas for improvements there.
During the rest of the morning, summit participants focused on “tools for success” workshops, including industry clusters, demographic information, regional collaboration, community infrastructure, funding opportunities, making connections and the northwest Arkansas connection.
“We were assembled from a wide range of disciplines to discuss challenges, but more importantly, to discuss opportunities,” said Jay Hannah, who served as moderator for some of the large group sessions.
Hannah, a banker and former Tahlequah civic leader, said the conference was important for defining a “regional DNA” and map local assets and liabilities.
He encouraged participants to work together for regional economic improvement, to become “a fellowship of the dedicated.”
“We were all reintroduced to one another with a passionate focus on what it will take to move this region forward,” he said. “You may discover how your local community can become a part of that group of thinkers and dreamers.”
