Obama’s Uninsured

Kevin Donohue got a temporary job working as Topspin, a mascot for Washington, D.C.‘s professional tennis team. The temporary gig comes without health insurance benefits. (Washington Kastles)

Kevin Donohue was a field organizer for Barack Obama’s campaign last year in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania. He came to Washington, D.C. in January to continue working for change. At first, Donohue took an unpaid internship with his congressman and waited tables, hoping like many former Obama staffers to get a job in the political process. But the outlook for Donohue was bleak. After getting rejected from three jobs on the same day, he finally took a temporary offer from the Washington Kastles, D.C.’s professional tennis squad, where he works with charity organizations and occasionally dresses up as a huge fuzzy tennis ball to cheer on the home team. There is no union, no health care coverage, and a finite period of employment. Donohue isn’t alone. More than 6,000 people worked on the campaign for Barack Obama. There are many that are either unemployed or uninsured, or both.

Most, if not all, of Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change veterans were among the 350,000 applicants for a few thousand jobs in Obama’s Washington. For those who didn’t have connections in the inner sanctum (or expansive resumes), the odds weren’t great. Some staffers who did not want to move to Washington, D.C. were depending on contacts made during the campaign for future opportunities. Now many of them are not only unemployed, but in the season of health care reform, they help comprise the 80 million under- or uninsured Americans (although the campaign cushioned the blow by extending health care benefits until the end of 2008).

“On Nov. 4, 2008, I realized our problems weren’t going to just go away; it would take time, compromises have to be made,” Donohue says, but he admits it isn’t easy. “I don’t have a job right now and I am struggling. But as an American citizen I respect the fact that statesmen can’t snap their fingers and turn out a perfect health care policy. Eventually, they will make a positive difference for the majority of people.”

The stories of former unemployed Obama staffers stack up. Benjamin Freed is a 25-year-old working as a temp in Washington, D.C. “I had an active role in shaping the communications strategy of one of the most heavily contested states in the country [Pennsylvania], on health care, on everything,” Freed says, while sitting in a coffee shop a couple of hundred yards from the White House. “And then on Nov. 4, around 11 p.m., they called the election. And that’s the last time I had a job.”

Surviving on money he earns from temp just isn’t enough to afford an individual health care plan. “I don’t have insurance—it’s too expensive,” Freed quickly answered. “I just have to be careful and stay healthy.”

In the meantime, former staffers like Donohue and Freed are carefully rationing expenses and praying they don’t get sick. The prospect can be stressful.

“I worry every day I don’t discover a lump in my breast, [develop] a cough that won’t go away, or [fall victim to] an errant city bus careening into me,” Elizabeth Burke, who was part of the advance team in Iowa and the Get Out the Vote initiative in Pittsburgh, recently wrote on her blog. “If I get any disease or life-threatening injury while uninsured, there will be no treatments, no chemo, no surgeries and I will probably die.”

Other ex-Obama staffers aren’t so morbid; they are returning to what they know. Despite the lack of long-term employment or regular insurance coverage, a surprising number of the old field team is going back into the fray to fight for Obama’s health plan as volunteers. After his November victory, Obama transformed his oft-praised campaign structure into Organizing For America, an activist group that buttresses the presidential position with grassroots support.

“Since health care started to heat up, I’ve been pretty deeply involved in my Organizing for America group,” says Darlene Messina, an ex-field organizer in northeastern Pennsylvania. “[Our group] stayed cohesive and active after the election. I haven’t been hired on staff or anything like that; I am back to volunteer work. I’m still looking for full-time employment [and] freelancing, but now I’m doing this again too.”

Organizing For America groups like Messina’s have been active across the country gathering stories from those left behind by the current American health care system. The group broadcasts their findings in web ads, press releases, and YouTube videos, while engaging in run-of-the-mill activist activities like door to door canvassing and writing earnest letters to the editor.

Leslie Purham, an unemployed single mother living in Illinois, has also been approached by old contacts from Organizing For America to help promote the new health care plan.

It’s an issue that hits close to home for Purham. “I don’t know of anyone in my camp who has gotten a job [with the administration or any other political group],” Purham says upon returning from a doctor’s appointment that got cancelled due to her lack of insurance. “It makes me wonder if anybody got a job.”

Despite her fears of single-handedly raising a “bright male black child” without consistent work or insurance (“I am sooooooo worried,” she wrote in an email, although Purham says she qualifies for Medicaid) and her less than full-throated support for Obama’s progress (“[the plan] is still not clear”), she still wants to attend the meetings and help out in any way she can. “I have never believed in anything more than the Campaign for Change,” she says. “In as much as I may sound disappointed, I still believe.”

But volunteering, no matter how compelling and useful to the cause, doesn’t cover co-payments or pay for groceries. Former Obama campaigners work as waiters, canvassers, and as a man-size tennis ball mascot. Freed is currently registered with three temp agencies, and he is keeping an eye out for his big break.

“I don’t have any regrets about working for Obama,” says Freed, who was on the convention floor in 2004 when then state senator Obama gave the speech that launched him into the national firmament. “People ask me what I do and I tell them ‘right now I do nothing, but last year I worked for the Obama team.’ Sometimes even now they still say ‘thank you.’ Maybe I should say, ‘You’re very welcome, but if you really want to thank me, hire me.’”

Jake Blumgart is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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