Just before eight-thirty this morning, I arrived at the compound of the Connecticut Hospital Association in Wallingford. My coworker, who drove us there in her boxy black SUV, wondered sarcastically how the “nonprofit” federation of the state’s medical establishment would find itself in possession of a thick-carpeted, air-conditioned, convention center. The place looks like a sterile cross between the Marriot and the dentist’s office, but compared to some of the Spartan hell-holes that have passed for office space in my time in the trenches of nonprofit advocacy, this place was like the Pentagon. Our own one-room (we used to rent the adjacent office but stopped in order to save money) office back in New Haven, at Student Health Outreach, looks more like your average “nonprofit.”

[More in the extended]

We had driven to Wallingford for a gathering of other nonprofit health advocates like ourselves, Department of Social Services (DSS) bureaucrats to discuss the implications of the changes the legislature made last week to the state’s HUSKY health program for kids and families. Pretty boring stuff, if you’re not a health advocate, in which case it was interesting and real and significant. The conference room was full of health advocates—caring folks who spend their days battling with DSS, the health plans and the hospitals in order to get health coverage for the most vulnerable people in the state. In other words, we are people who know that the HUSKY changes are fucking life and death to their clients, and so we hung on every word about copays, income guidelines, and transitional Medicaid assistance.

Scanning the room from my chair, I realized that I am deeply impressed by my comrades in the tedious yet critical fight for healthcare access. We advocates keep tabs on the state and guide thousands of people through the jungle of application forms and acronyms that compose the health system. God bless them for showing up in this drab conference room to nail down the eligibility criteria for, say, adults with children earning between 100 percent and 150 percent of the poverty level. Bless them for every time they have not taken “no” for an answer from some two-bit pharmacist or hospital administrator who has overcharged a destitute client.

I also wonder if we are destined for failure.

I’ll re-phrase: I love the nonprofit people (I am one of them), but I wonder if we can ever fulfill our real mission, which, to me, is affordable and accessible healthcare for everyone.

[Stay tuned for part two, in which I'll discuss the contributions of Malcolm X and Dead Prez to the debate on social welfare. Now I'm exhausted.]