Newark Mayor Cory Booker pushes health plan for uninsured

[MH1]

Source: Associated Press

NEWARK -- The mayor isn't waiting to see whether national health care reform is successful in Washington, D.C.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker started a pilot program with the pharmaceutical industry and philanthropist Teresa Heinz to provide primary health care and prescription drugs to uninsured residents. The wife of former presidential candidate John Kerry is helping fund the initiative.

Heinz Family Philanthropies has funded similar initiatives in Chicago, California and Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Organization president Jeffrey Lewis said the goal is to craft a cheaper way to care for the uninsured before chronic illnesses like diabetes require costly hospital stays.

Read more: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/09/newark_mayor_cory_booker_pushe.html

[blm]

1. Surely this story deserved more ink. It's better than the one in GD from AP.

Oh well....we take what positive press we can get, eh?


>>>>>>
The program results from a partnership between the clinic, the Heinz Family Foundation, the City of Newark and several major pharmaceutical companies as well as Kings and Liss Pharmacies in Newark. Booker and Teresa Heinz -- philanthropist and wife of former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) -- hope to use the program as a template for similar healthcare efforts around the city.

"The anxiety, the fear, the doubt the worry is going to be banished in the city of Newark," he said.

Heinz is pushing similar efforts throughout the nation that focus on local needs and local services. The foundation has funded similar initiatives in Chicago, California and Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Saying that top-down efforts are not as effective as homegrown responses to healthcare, Heinz is hopeful that she can generate support for coverage that features public and private partnerships and transcends the rancor characterizing the current debate.

"We have to have local accountability and management," Heinz after her remarks today. "If people know what they can get than they know what they are fighting for."
>>>>>

[karynnj]

2. Nice

Teresa Heinz Kerry is amazing. It is very easy to see why her husband has said that she has the strongest moral compass of anyone he knows (or something like that).

[karynnj]

3. Cory Booker is a really interesting young politician

Here's his bio:

Booker obtained a J.D. in 1997 from Yale Law School where he started and operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven. He was also a Big Brother, and was active in the Black Law Students Association. Booker lived in Newark during his final year at Yale and following graduation served as Staff Attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York and Program Coordinator of the Newark Youth Project.

From 1998 to 2006, he lived in Brick Towers, a troubled housing complex in Newark's Central Ward. Booker organized tenants to fight for improved conditions. In November 2006, as one of the last remaining tenants in Brick Towers, Booker left his apartment for the top unit in a three-story rental on Hawthorne Avenue in Newark's South Ward, an area described as "a drug-and gang-plagued neighborhood of boarded-up houses and empty lots."<4> Brick Towers has since been demolished and a new mixed-income development will be built there in 2010.<5>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Booker

[tabbycat31]

4. he has interesting tweets too

I think he's going somewhere. I hope he decides to run for governor of NJ one day.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

5. Teresa Heinz IS morally directed and, apparently, so is this mayor.

I hope the best for their initiative. I also hope it leads to pilot programs that will better serve us rural folks. I am grateful my health-challenged spouse has health care insurance but I am uninsured in order to sustain it. If I get sick, it's over, for both of us.