At area gathering spots, ideas on health-care reform run the gamut

For Jared Hayslett, the choice comes down to health insurance or food.

Hayslett, 29, works full time as manager of Ashland Coffee & Tea, but he cannot afford medical coverage.

"I'd have to cut my groceries in half, which means I'd have to start eating cheaper," Hayslett said. "I'm trying to eat healthy so I don't get sick, but eating healthy costs a little more. What do I do?"

When Hayslett gets sick and needs to see a physician, he pays cash. If medicine is involved, he asks the doctor if it's absolutely necessary for his well-being.

"If it isn't," Hayslett said, "I don't get it."

As for the current debate over health-care reform, Hayslett said he's becoming disillusioned as political leaders are simply "stonewalling each other."

"It's really sad," he said.

We wanted to see what Richmond-area residents think about health-care reform, away from the emotion-filled town-hall meetings. So we headed out to gathering spots in central Virginia to gauge public opinion.

Everyone we spoke to said something needs to be done, but that's where the consensus ended.

Ashland

Danny Adams, who owns the old-school Ashland Feed Store, is more accustomed to fielding questions about animals, gardening and the price of the Grape Nehi sodas in the cooler. But as he stood in his store just west of the railroad tracks in Ashland's town cen ter, the conversation turned to health-care reform, and whether we need to change the way Americans receive medical treatment and pay for it.

"It just seems crazy the way it's gotten out of hand," he said, before quickly adding that he hasn't figured out how to fix health care.

"I'm just going to keep selling seed," he said with a laugh, "and hope I don't get sick."

Instead of traditional medical insurance, the 48-year-old Adams and his family have a health savings account, to which they make tax-free contributions that can be withdrawn, tax-free, for qualified medical expenses.

"I've been pretty impressed with how that works," Adams said. "You put money in there and then you pay for all of your small things. Any catastrophic illness would still be covered by insurance.

"But we're healthy people," Adams said, "which may play into the reason we saved money going to that."

Over at Ashland Coffee & Tea, owner Truman Parmele, who purchased the shop with his wife, Moya, this year, said politics and profits should be removed from the health-care process.

Parmele's brother died of a heart attack at 44, in part, he believes, because he didn't have health insurance and didn't regularly visit a doctor. Parmele would like to offer a group medical plan to his employees, but it's prohibitively expensive in a small operation.

As a retired federal worker, Parmele and his wife, both 64, are covered by federal health insurance, and he's not opposed to a "public option" of government-sponsored health care.

"Which is worse?" he asked. "I would almost trust the government more than I would insurance companies."

Nick Valentine, 20, a Randolph-Macon College student and a part-time employee at the shop, said that on paper, universal health care sounds like a fine idea, but he believes it's unlikely to work. He's not encouraged by what he has heard about other countries with government-run health care. Any government involvement, he said, should be strictly limited.

However, he's already thinking about the day when he's on his own and no longer covered by his parents' insurance. "I definitely do worry about it," he said. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

Shelley Whittington, who stopped in for an afternoon chai tea, said she has health insurance but looks at medical bills and insurance write-offs and thinks "something is out of whack that needs to be fixed."

"It's just crazy," she said. "People can't afford insurance."

At a nearby table, Alan Horenstein sat working on his laptop, searching for jobs and sipping a latte. He was laid off from his job in corporate finance at Capital One in March. He still has health insurance through COBRA, which provides temporary continuation of health-care coverage at group rates.

"I think it's sorely overdue," he said of health-care reform. "I'm 100 percent for the government taking over the whole thing."

Horenstein drew a stark comparison between his relatives in Europe and relatives in the United States. One sister in Denmark is fully covered by government-sponsored health care. Another sister's three children in the United States "have never been to a dentist."

"I'm somewhere in between," he said. "I'm in my mid-40s, and for much of my life, I was an entrepreneur and considered myself invincible. I went without health insurance, ate health food and exercised and tried to stay out of car accidents. At this point in my life, I realize that's not a smart place to be, and you really need health care."

Across the street at the Iron Horse Restaurant, Mary Garner-Mitchell, a 52-year-old self-employed graphic artist, finished lunch and talked about the challenges she and her husband, a self-employed photographer, face acquiring health insurance.

"It's rivaling our house payment," she said, noting that the policy comes with high deductibles. "For the last five years, it's increased 20 to 22 percent each year. This year, it came in at over $1,000 a month. We're the forgotten children, people who are self-employed. We don't have anybody negotiating for us."

She would like to see more competition in the marketplace. She'd also like to see price breaks given to people who lead healthy lifestyles.

"It might encourage people to get in shape if you put a dollar figure on it," she said.

Hopewell

At the Hopewell Quick Lunch, an institution famous for its chili dogs and loyal customers, cook Sandra Cotman said she has a simple health-insurance policy: "I don't get sick."

Good thing.

Cotman, 50, who has worked at the Quick Lunch since she was a teenager, has no health insurance. So far, her plan has worked.

"I've been working all my life, and I guarantee you I have not been out of work 10 times since I've been working here," she said.

Mary Sue Krout, who purchased the Quick Lunch last year, said something must be done.

"I think health insurance needs to be affordable for everyone," Krout said. "I have a personal policy, and it's quite expensive, and all I do is get a checkup and get my teeth cleaned every year."

She suggested the price of health insurance could be based on a person's income or on a sliding scale. She's not excited about a government-financed public option, but she wouldn't mind a little oversight.

Customer David Wall, 60, who lives in Prince George County and stopped in for lunch, said he's totally against government-run health care and believes America has the best health-care system in the world. However, he also said it "certainly could use some improvements."

A home-improvement contractor, he has been out of work for several months. He also is without health insurance at the moment, his wife having lost her job.

"I'm not super-worried about it," he said. "If I get sick, I know how to find care. If you go to the hospital, they're not going to turn you away."

Richmond

Ronnie Logan, 57, who sells barbecue from a trailer set up in a parking lot on East Main Street, said his business is booming, and he has health insurance now. It wasn't that long ago, though, that he and his wife lost their jobs and their medical coverage.

"I didn't have a checkup for almost two years," said Logan, of Ronnie's Ribs Wings & Other Things. "Couldn't afford it, living on unemployment and scratching in the dirt, trying to make a living.

"There should be something there, especially in times like this with so many people out of work. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one going through that."

But then he wondered about all of the jobs in the health-care field and what might happen to those people if the entire system is overhauled.

"It's a complex thing," he said.

Henrico County

Robert G. Saunders Jr. was sitting where he is every morning -- at the counter of Country Style Doughnuts on Williamsburg Road, a place with doughnuts that customers drive across the county for, and apple fritters the size of small states.

Saunders sipped his coffee and said the nation's health-care system needs fixing, but the government can't afford to do it.

"They're writing checks we don't have the money for," said Saunders, 69, a retired cement-truck driver. "How can you say the government ought to pay more?"

Two stools over, Charles Turner couldn't disagree more.

Universal health care? "I'm all for it," said Turner, 86, a World War II veteran and a retired salesman for a linen company.

"I do believe in capitalism because it gives you incentive to get ahead. But so many people are losing their jobs and losing their health care. I think it's really needed. I'm not concerned so much about myself as the general public."

Fred and Nancy Wheeler sat in a booth, sharing a fritter. Both are in favor of health-care reform, but neither is in favor of government involvement in health care, in part because of the nation's financial situation.

"We need a change," said Fred Wheeler, 80, "but we don't need the kind of change [President Barack Obama] is trying to give us."

Behind the counter, shop owner Wafaa Nassereddine said: "Before you pay any kind of bills, you have to pay your insurance bills because if you don't and you get sick you could lose everything you've got. My husband had a heart attack a couple of years ago, and if we didn't have insurance we probably would have lost this shop."

Vic Kleiner, 70, a retired nurse, said huge sums of money can be saved by the reduction of unnecessary medical testing -- brought on, in his view, by malpractice fears. Americans also need to adjust their medical expectations, he said.

"Somehow medical care seems to think everybody should be in perfect health all the time," Kleiner said. "It's way too ideal. I think some of the old-age problems . . . just live with them. Care is great, but I think a lot of it is unnecessary."

Goochland County

Taking lunch orders behind the counter at Javajodi's Coffee Café in Goochland, Shelley Connell said she can't imagine how people without insurance make it.

"I can barely afford it with insurance," said Connell, 47, the shop's daytime manager, who is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor. "I don't know that I'm wise enough to know what should be done, but I do know what doesn't need to be done and that's having more people waiting to go to the doctor and getting sicker. We need some kind of public health care."

Allison Peterson, who stopped by the popular shop for lunch with her 3-year-old daughter, Maria, said she's "very much in favor of an option that would be more just for more members of society."

"I think the time is right," said Peterson, who lives in Goochland County and believes the quality of medical care is high but needs to be more equitable in its availability. "I'm very supportive of an option to give more people an opportunity to have insurance, or at least to obtain health care they can afford."

She doesn't feel threatened by a government-run option, having seen a relative receive "excellent" long-term care in France. But she's not certain what the government's role should be here

Eating lunch on the cafe's front porch, Michele Ward of Powhatan County said she knows exactly what the government's role should be: It shouldn't have one.

"I certainly don't want the government running the health-care system," she said. "Medicare's broke. Social Security's broke. Now you're gong to break something that's already breaking?"

Ward, a registered nurse, said she thinks any reform needs to start at "ground zero" and include every part of the health-care system, including lawyers who file malpractice suits. She also said she doesn't want to lose the freedom she has under the current setup. She sought specialized surgery in New York for a daughter who shattered her leg last year.

"Granted, I had to pay more out-of-pocket . . . but that was my choice," she said. "With government, it would have been caught up in red tape or months, if not years, even if they had approved it. She had a tendon that was dying, and she had to have a transplant. It would have been totally dead by then."

Waiting for lunch, Philip DeSantolo said he used to live in South Florida, where indigent care overloaded the health-care system with uninsured patients crowding into emergency rooms for basic care. That's just one problem that needs to be addressed by everyone.

"We need to stop being political about it," said DeSantolo, who works for Goochland Powhatan Community Services. "If we don't address this, it's going to blow up in our faces or, down the road, in our children's faces."

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .