On a More Serious Note
You should really read David Koehler’s interview in Peoria Magazines
I excerpted a bit about his background in the previous post, but he has a really fascinating background and is incredibly articulate.
After graduating from college in 1971, I enrolled in seminary. I first attended Payne Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio. Payne Seminary is an African Methodist Episcopal seminary and was part of a five-seminary consortium directed by a former Yankton College professor, Dr. Frederick Kirschenmann. He was my mentor and the reason I went to Payne Seminary. The program was called “Seminary without Walls” and was designed as a non-traditional educational program for ministry.
I had a growing interest in interning for the National Farm Worker Ministry, which worked to improve conditions for farm workers. It was this interest that led the ministry to assist Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). I actually graduated from another of the consortium seminaries, the United Theological Seminary, a United Methodist Church affiliate, in Dayton, Ohio, on June 14, 1974. I was ordained into the ministry of the United Church of Christ at my home church in Yankton on June 16, 1974.
I continued my work with the National Farm Worker Ministry and spent a short time in Arizona before moving to Cleveland to direct the UFW Office, where we worked with community, church and union support groups. It was in Cleveland that I met Nora Sullivan, my wife. She was a student at Cleveland State University and wanted to do an internship with the UFW for her social work degree. We fell in love and in 1976 were married by my father at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ on Cleveland’s near west side.
After Ohio, I was sent to New York City to direct the boycott office there. We lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, on 184th Street. The office was a five-story brownstone apartment where we also lived. Most of the staff, however, lived in a closed Catholic High School building in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Our daughter Kate was born at Roosevelt Hospital that spring.
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Illinois afford to do what needs to be done?
Being “in lieu of a national healthcare plan” has been going on for a long time now. I hope the next President of the United States will lead the charge to change that. The last time healthcare reform was tried at the national level was during the Clinton years, and even with a Democratic Congress, it failed.
In the meantime, the states are left to take on the task of reforming the healthcare system on their own. The simple truth is that we cannot afford not to change the healthcare system. Any family or business knows that healthcare costs are the most unpredictable budget item you deal with each year. In Illinois, in one year, over $80 billion is spent on healthcare, both public and private dollars. That’s around $6,400 per person. Shouldn’t we spend that money in a more efficient way so that we can close the gap on the 1.4 million people who have no healthcare insurance? Because the truth is that we do pay for those uninsured people—we pay for them through cost shifting. Wouldn’t it be better to put in place a plan that encouraged early detection so that catastrophic health events are identified through prevention and wellness programs and not in the emergency room?
Another issue regarding healthcare is that many of the costs today are due to lifestyle choices. Heart disease, hypertension and diabetes are just a few of the chronic diseases plaguing our nation. Poor choices are creating a runaway train that will bankrupt us if we don’t stop current practices and change course through education and the provision of screening and healthcare access before issues become major health events.
A downstate guy with real grassroots experience could go a long way in this cycle. I’m not a fan of the open it up to everyone and their crazy brother method, but if Koehler comes out of this process, I can’t think of a better person to highlight broad differences between the two parties and especially their candidates.