The strategy session took place Monday in a basement hall at Meriden’s Mount Hebron Baptist Church. The setting was fitting for the coming quest. For universal health care to pass in the upcoming state legislative session — and some leading politicians are indeed promising to try to make that happen — activists from churches, urban minority communities, labor, and small businesses will need to present a sophisticated, sizeable, consistent campaign.

That’s why organizers of the statewide effort have focused for the past year on building support groups among clergy, small business, unions and black and Latino organizations, with new activists like Ricardo Henriquez. Representatives of those groups comprised a big chunk of the activists who filled the Mount Hebron hall for the day-long strategey session Monday.

It’s true that two powerful political figures remain to be convinced on the need for a state plan to cover the 350,000 to 400,000 uninsured people in Connecticut. Republican Gov. Jodi Rell said in this year’s campaign that she saw no reason for a universal plan; she felt no need even to respond with an alternative to Democratic candidate John DeStefano’s universal plan. And the Democratic speaker of the state House of Representatives, Jim Amann, has said he wants to focus for now just on insuring all children, not adults.

However, Massachusetts, under a Republican governor, passed a version of universal health care this year. Connecticut’s Rell has proved persuadable or open to compromise on other progressive campaigns she had opposed, like campaign finance reform and civil unions. Two other powerful Democratic officeholders, State Senate President Don Williams and Senate Majority Leader Marty Looney, have come out for passing a universal health care bill in the session that starts in January. Democrats have increased their majority at the Capitol, with at least some rank-and-filers on the universal health bandwagon.

Forest, For Now, Not Trees

So the mission of the organizers of Monday’s session — the Universal Health Care Foundation — was to gear up the grassroots to give legislators either the support or the public pressure needed to pass the bill in the face of expected opposition from insurance industry and corporate lobbyists. (Disclosure: The foundation contributes grant money to the Online Journalism Project, which publishes this web site.)

The message of the event was: Stay on message. Rather than focus for now on the fine points of differing universal plans — a state-run single-payer system, for instance, or a state pool of money that enables uninsured people to choose from among competing private plans — emphasize the basic idea that some sort of universal plan is needed. Note that experts say the state actually would save money long-term with a universal plan. Continually point out that all segments of Connecticut are hurt by the out-of-control cost of health care, from business owners to workers to taxpayers socked indirectly with the bills for uninsured people who get treated in hospitals. (For details of various universal plans, click here and here.) In the short term, insuring all the uninsured would cost $343 million, or 2.3 percent of current total health care spending, according to the foundation.

Out In The Field

Ricardo Henriquez said he’s motivated to join the quest in part to help immigrants like himself. That’s what he ends up doing much of the time as a health-care organizer for a group in New Haven’s largely Latino Fair Haven neighborhood, called the Grand Avenue Village Association (GAVA).

Click on the play arrow to watch Henriquez discuss the health-care challenges facing immigrants in Fair Haven and Connecticut.

Henriquez, who’s 32, left Chile in 2001. He was a reporter for La Cuarta, a 150,000-circulation daily newspaper founded to serve a largely low-income readership. Once in New Haven, he found a job at Atticus Bookstore & Cafe, a place known as friendly to immigrants. He started out waiting tables. Before he left, he had risen to the position of bookstore manager. He said he recently took the health-care organizing job because “I wanted to do something more social.”

Len Smart (pictured at Monday’s event) has also begun organizing for the universal health campaign. Smart runs the Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association, a group of black businesses.

Also key to the organizing effort are community health clinics like the Fair Haven Community Health Center, represented at Monday’s session by Denise Dean (pictured next to Merryl Eaton of Christian Community Action).

Like Ricardo Henriquez, Aradis Akhter (pictured) is motivated in part by personal experience to jump into the campaign. She left the insurance industry to take a health-care organizing post with New Haven’s Christian Community Action.

“I have a mother who’s very ill,” Aradis said. “It’s always been a problem — what insurance will cover, what insurance will not cover, prescriptions…”

Aradis previously worked as a claims specialist at Anthem/Blue Cross Blue Shield. She dealt mostly with low-income families on the state HUSKY plan. They routinely had trouble finding doctors who would see them. Reimbursements were routinely delayed. The experience convinced Aradis, like the other activists assembled at Mount Hebron, that band-aids won’t fix the problem, that Connecticut’s health-care system needs dramatic reform.