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Undaunted, man fights for the uninsured
© St. Petersburg Times FARMVILLE, Va. -- The darkest hour of Ken Woodley's life came during a walk down a rural road with his wife, Kim, on a cold December night in 1998. "What's the matter?," he asked her, suddenly aware that she had been unusually silent. "I could not see her face; there are no streetlights," he remembers. "I just heard her say, 'I found a lump in my breast here,' and she put my hand there and I felt it." Even now, as he retells the story, Woodley's gentle face reflects the pain he felt that night when he was confronted with the prospect of losing his wife to a fatal illness. "It was like all the stars flickered and went out," he said. "It was a cold, dark night and suddenly the cold and the dark seemed to come alive." No one would have blamed him if he had buried his memory of that moment under piles of denial after his wife's life was saved by a mastectomy and months of chemotherapy. Instead, Woodley, 45, as he has done so often throughout his two-decade career as editor of the tiny Farmville Herald (circulation 10,000), turned his experience into a public crusade to help others. "Turning the Darkness Into Light" is the theme of Woodley's campaign, which has succeeded in persuading the Virginia Legislature to create a fund for uninsured citizens with life-threatening illness. Funded by a tax checkoff, the program will begin dispensing money to victims of cancer and other serious illnesses in early July. But Woodley is not satisfied. With the help of several influential politicians, including Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, he thinks he can extend the same assistance to people who have no health insurance across the country. Were it not for his early success, Woodley might easily be dismissed as a naive dreamer or a publicity seeker. He admits he is tackling a problem that has confounded smarter, more powerful men. But whenever doubts arise, he asks himself: What are compassionate Americans supposed to do when Congress and the president fail to help the 18,000 Americans without health insurance who die every year? "Politicians have been debating this for decades and people are still dying," Woodley noted. "A tax checkoff would at least let the American people do something to help in the meantime, if they want to." The idea came to him in an instant. Woodley and a friend, Sarah Terry, were having lunch at a local sub shop in February 1999. Terry, who was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer at the same time as Woodley's wife, told him about a woman without health insurance she had met in the waiting room of a treatment center. The woman had lived with the cancer for more than a year while searching for an organization that would help her. "I was just instantly taken back to that cold, dark country road and the terror -- the literal terror -- that gripped my wife and me," he said. "I can't imagine what that woman living alone and untreated, what she must have felt for so long. "I'm surprised I just didn't start cursing and throwing things against the wall. Instead, I just opened my mouth and said, 'I want to create a fund, a tax checkoff to save these people.' I think it was a God-given idea." It was not unusual for Woodley to be thinking about solving the problem. Almost from the day he joined the staff of the Farmville Herald after graduating from a local college in 1979, he recognized that his job reporting and writing editorials for the three-times-a-week newspaper gave him the unusual power to rally others to civic causes. "I've tried to take advantage of that as much as I could to help other people," he said. Earlier, Woodley had helped establish a museum honoring the local African-American students who staged a protest against the poor quality of their schools in 1951, 41/2 years before Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat in Birmingham. And he had worked to create a regional economic development council, which recently got $1.7-million from Virginia's settlement against tobacco companies. But because the checkoff was more ambitious than his previous brainstorms, Woodley was stunned at how fast it became reality. Just seven weeks after his lunch with Terry at the sub shop, the Virginia Legislature voted to create the Uninsured Medical Catastrophe Fund. Two state legislators, one from each party, had agreed to sponsor the measure, and it was attached as an amendment to a bill that was certain to pass. Getting the legislation proved to be much easier for Woodley than persuading people to contribute. Former Gov. Jim Gilmore signed the bill but did nothing to publicize the fund. Woodley soon realized it would go unused unless he did more. The first person Woodley called on for fundraising help was Rev. James Peter Lee, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. "I said, 'There will be a statewide day of contributions on Sunday, April 7, the first day of daylight saving time,"' Woodley recalls. "I didn't say I was trying to, or I hoped to do it. I said there's going to be . . ." Episcopal, Presbyterian and Catholic clergy agreed to ask the members of their churches to make donations, and Woodley got his newspaper to print 4,000 black, white and yellow posters, proclaiming April 7 the day that Virginia would "Turn the Darkness Into Light." The theme, of course, was based on Woodley's personal experience. "Ever since my wife and I were on that road that night in December 1998, we have wanted to turn the darkness of that moment into light," he said. Woodley also succeeded in soliciting the help of Gov. Warner, even before the young Democrat was elected last November. Warner visited Woodley's messy, 1950s-era newspaper office last summer and promised to help. After Warner was inaugurated in January, he invited Woodley to join him at a news conference in Richmond to appeal for contributions. "It's great to see a journalist also have passion," Warner said of Woodley. Virginians were familiar with the concept of a tax checkoff. The state has at least a dozen other programs that benefit from a checkoff, many of them environmental causes. But Woodley's is different because it created a project. Contributions have been less than Woodley expected, however. Only $80,000 has been collected, barely enough to save the life of a single uninsured person. By comparison, a checkoff to preserve wildlife received $260,829 in 1996, the latest year for which the state has data. The state Department of Medical Services will hold a lottery in July to select names of people to receive help as the money becomes available. Undaunted, Woodley intends to work harder to promote the fund, and he has contacted a variety of national organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the NAACP, seeking their support for creating a national tax checkoff for the uninsured. More than 40-million uninsured people are in the United States -- 1-million in Virginia and 2.2-million in Florida -- and experts say they die at a higher rate than people with health insurance. These are primarily people in low-income jobs -- those whose wages disqualify them from Medicaid but do not provide enough to cover health insurance premiums. President Bush last year proposed a plan to help the low-income uninsured, but Congress never considered it and the administration did not lobby for it. A few states have been trying with limited success to help the uninsured by expanding eligibility for Medicare benefits. If Woodley has learned anything in his effort to fill this breach, it is the value of chutzpah. "I told Bishop Lee about a month ago, I said, 'You know when I first called you, I feel certain you probably thought I was representing an organization with structure and there was this whole thing under way and you just hadn't heard about it. The truth is it was just me on the telephone, saying it was going to happen.' " In Washington, Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had agreed to give Woodley five minutes in early 2001 to present his case for creating a national tax checkoff to pay for treatment for uninsured people with life-threatening illnesses. Sarah Terry and Rep. Virgil Goode, Woodley's local congressman, accompanied him to the meeting with Thomas. "In the the middle of our lobbying effort," Woodley said, "Rep. Thomas got a phone call from his wife, who apparently was having a problem with a sink drain at their home. And we sat there a couple of feet away, watching him talk to her about fixing the drain. And we're thinking, 'My God, we're in the middle of this, we have our precious few minutes and now the discussion has gone to sinks and drains.' " Woodley saw Thomas' chat with his wife as more than just rudeness. "It just seemed to represent everything that Congress is doing now, paying attention to the wrong drains -- not the drains down which human life is flowing," Woodley said. "It's symbolic of so many of us Americans who have health insurance. The kitchen drains of life distract our attention away from what's really important." Although he met Thomas a year ago, he has never received a response. Woodley notes with some bitterness that members of Congress have an excellent health care plan financed by taxpayers. Thomas' aides were stunned by Woodley's criticism. Christin Tinsworth, Ways and Means Committee spokeswoman, noted that Thomas has devoted his career to enacting improvements in the American health care system and "creating a mechanism of access to health care for the uninsured is a priority." Thomas has been pressing a Republican proposal to create a refundable tax credit of up to 60 percent for health insurance premiums over a 12-month period for people who are put out of work. The bill would cost $12.9-billion. When he was younger, Woodley wrote a book of poetry, Everest. It talks about overcoming personal doubts by "climbing mountains inside yourself." He reflects on those poems whenever he feels discouraged or seized by self-doubt. He thinks, too, about an uninsured woman in Virginia he heard about recently who decided to die rather than spend the family's resources seeking treatment for a deadly illness. "I think about that woman every day," he said. "That is wrong."
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