Nevadans share health care tales

When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton opened the floor Sunday after a health care-themed talk in Las Vegas, most people didn't want to ask her a question so much as tell her a story.

A woman who said she was forced to retire from a pharmaceutical company after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis said she had witnessed abuses by the drug and insurance industries that the government fails to crack down on. Then she pointed to her elderly mother seated next to her, who she said had to return to a hospital for a second retina surgery after the first one caused an infection.

Another woman had brought her young daughter. "She looks perfectly healthy, doesn't she?" the woman asked. "But she has a condition that requires lifelong care." And the one specialist her insurance allows her to see is so overloaded with patients that appointments feel "like a conveyor belt."

A woman who described herself as between jobs said she had the option to continue her coverage through the federal COBRA program, but couldn't afford the $700 a month rates.

Three men in wheelchairs, seated in front, told of their predicaments: One, a retired Marine, saw the availability of care shrinking for his fellow "jarheads." The second said he was a Native American with diabetes who had to see 16 different doctors. The third spoke haltingly and was barely intelligible. He said he'd had a stroke in 2001, and "thank God for Medicare."

Clinton's husband, the former president, was famous for weaving ordinary Americans' stories into his speeches, a habit some derided as a gimmick or phony or even exploitative. But collecting and dispensing real-life tales is clearly a tendency shared by Hillary Clinton as she makes a run of her own.

It is a technique especially suited to the New York senator's signature issue, health care, as everybody seems to have a horror story and finds it cathartic to share. The vivid details of such anecdotes allowed Clinton to make concrete such otherwise abstract topics as the importance of digital medical records.

Clinton staged some storytelling of her own at Sunday's discussion at the East Las Vegas Community Center, bringing two women on stage with her to kick off the Q&A before an audience of about 600 people. The first told of fighting with insurance companies to get care for her multiple sclerosis. The second, a retired nurse, said she had to wait more than 100 days after her breast cancer was diagnosed to get into surgery.

In each tale, Clinton found the underlying issue and explained how she would fix it. Her health care plan, she said, would "take on" the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' bad practices. It would improve health care quality and give people more choices between insurance plans. It would eliminate COBRA and make insurance fully portable from job to job and state to state.

And so on, and so on. "Everybody has a story. Everybody is concerned about the future," Clinton said. "This is going to have to be approached as a shared responsibility." Health care, she said, is "a real problem, and it's a problem we need to have an election about."

Returning to Nevada for the first time in more than two months, Clinton had a full day Sunday, attending services at a Baptist church in the morning, meeting with unions, dropping in at a meeting of the Clark County Democratic Party and holding a rally at the newly constructed Springs Preserve's amphitheater.

Backed by risers full of members of the machinists and letter carriers unions, which have endorsed her, Clinton gave a 20-minute summary of her campaign platform, touching on foreign policy, the economy, education, energy and, of course, health care. The biggest cheer, as always at Democratic campaign events, came when she declared her commitment to ending the Iraq war.

She hammered home what has become a campaign theme, "invisibility." "When you look around you, people are working as hard as they can, but they don't feel like they're getting ahead, do they?" she said. "They feel invisible to our president. ... When I am president, there will not be invisible Americans any longer."

That was the note that resonated with audience member Dave Garrett, 58, a union ironworker. "I'm all for her," he said. "She's a strong supporter of the middle class, and the middle class is disappearing in this country."

Clinton and other speakers had emphasized that the candidate's strong lead in statewide polls wouldn't mean anything unless enough people put in "a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon" to support her in the Jan. 19 caucuses, the state's first early nominating contest.

"Nevada is in the spotlight," Clinton said. "The whole country, indeed the whole world, is going to be watching. People are going to say, 'Well, do the folks in Nevada care enough to turn out?'"

Garrett and his wife Jan were clear on that point. "We're definitely going to be at the caucus," Jan Garrett said.

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@ reviewjournal.com or (702) 387-2919.