Healthy Wyoming launches statewide push toward health care for all

Dec. 9--CHEYENNE -- For Dayton resident Julia Willis and her partner, access to health care, specifically through the Affordable Care Act, was the difference between life and death.

Willis' wife endured repeated treatment for a rare cancer. After this "traumatic" experience and caring for her wife, Willis also got sick. It took three years for her to be diagnosed with Lyme disease. Though the couple could not afford to purchase private insurance, they also didn't qualify for Medicaid.

"If it weren't for the ACA being passed when it was, my wife and I wouldn't have had health insurance for many years, and she would not be alive without health care," Willis said, reading from a letter she wrote a local representative.

Willis was one of more than 100 people who joined a virtual training session Tuesday evening that served as the launch of Healthy Wyoming, an offshoot of the nonprofit organizing group Better Wyoming. Healthy Wyoming is currently forming county-level chapters to organize Wyomingites to lobby state legislators, with the long term goal of making affordable health care available to everyone.

In the short term, the group wants to protect the Wyoming Department of Health from budget cuts, and to expand Medicaid so that anyone with an income below 138% of the federal poverty line would be eligible, adding an estimated 27,000 Wyomingites.

"We need to bring stories, and not ideologies, to the capitol," said Rebecca Berry, Better Wyoming's organizing director.

Berry led the training, speaking about the importance of grassroots mobilization in making legislative change. Close to 30,000 people in Wyoming don't have access to basic health care, she said.

"The truth is, this health care crisis is a choice that our lawmakers are making," Berry said. "Through the power of collective action, we can pressure our lawmakers to secure health care access for everyone."

The key to recruiting people to a movement, Berry said, is having "intentional" one-on-one conversations with others in your community. Then, a group of people who feel strongly about an issue can work together to put pressure on elected officials who have the power to make policy changes. She encouraged everyone who attended the training to have three organizing conversations over the next month about making health care more accessible.

Louisa Crosby, a nurse practitioner based in Sheridan County, spoke about the "failures" she's seen in the healthcare system when it comes to people who are uninsured.

"What I've seen are people in their 30s, 40s and 50s showing up who are not getting the very basic health care screenings -- cancer screenings, for instance, that should start in teenage years or early 20s. People who are coming to get three to six months worth of birth control but can't afford a $5 donation to the clinic, because for them it's a matter of eating dinner that night," she said.

In the U.S., many have come to think of health care as a burden, because for most, it is a burden, Crosby said. The expansion of Medicaid could help change that by making health care accessible for thousands more across the state, she said.

For Willis, there are too many what-ifs that remain from her time without health care: If she had been able to afford doctors' visits, would she have been diagnosed earlier? If her Lyme disease had been caught early and treated, could she have avoided neurological issues, chronic pain and the need for a wheelchair?

"I don't think my life is worth more than anyone else's, but I also don't think anyone's life is worth more than mine," Willis said, reading from her letter. "When insurance companies' profits are prioritized and it's OK for some people not to have access to health care, that says some of your constituents' lives are less valuable than others, they matter less, our lives are less important."

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