Hometown Hero: Maureen Craig

Hometown Hero: Sister Maureen
Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth

Maureen Craig had a plan to go to Paris and write the great American novel and be like Zelda Fitzgerald, minus all the mental problems, and then come back to America to be a nun. She went to talk to Mother Mary Ancilla, the brilliant leader of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, who suggested she be more realistic. Maureen decided she would “give up on Paris and get started on saving the world.”

She had always thought nuns were “kind of weird. But my college teachers, all nuns, were bright, articulate and committed to service. I so admired them. I wanted to be like them.”

Sister Maureen taught elementary and high school. One year, the star of the first grade creation play, who was supposed to play God, got sick. His substitute, and please remember that first graders are very truthful, faced the audience bravely and said, “I am not the real God, the real God got sick and threw up and went home.” Sister says that’s a story she often tells.

“I had been teaching for 35 years and was diagnosed with MS and teaching was getting harder. Sister Marie Madeline invited me to Saint Johns to write the history of the hospital, which I did. “The Golden Promise” was published in 1992 in honor of the golden jubilee of Saint John’s Hospital.

“Now, at 76, I’m not afraid of much. I’m not afraid of illness. I’ve been there and done that. I’ve had MS for a long time and I’m doing that and I’m not afraid of death. “I think we need a national health care plan. It is a disgrace that, in America, we have anyone without health care. Congress has great health care for themselves. Why aren’t they making sure we all have the same?

“I teach new employees at the hospital, and the center of my teaching is that respecting the dignity of each person is the core of care at St. Johns. Respect the dignity of each patient and each family and all who work here. “It’s an honor to be brought into people’s lives in a time of crisis. My title is, Chaplain to the Foundation, but I introduce myself as Sister Maureen, and say I’m here to help and I ask if there is anything they need.

“My father was an Irish immigrant who was put on the boat by the British police after the 1916 Easter Monday Rebellion and exiled to Canada. Father then walked across the border at Niagara Falls with a group of America tourists. He was an illegal immigrant with a PH.D in political science from Magdalen College at Oxford. He and my mother met when he was giving a speech about Free Ireland. They married and had ten children.

“We children were wild and happy. We played outside until dark when our daddy whistled for us to come home. Every father had a whistle that his children recognized. I think all children, by law, should have at least two hours a day to be free outside, to just look at the world and to play.

“I came to St. Johns in 1987, joining the nuns living and working at the hospital. There had been as many as 25 nuns at St. Johns in the early years. Now there are 5 nuns and we all live in the same apartment house right across the street from the new hospital.

“Every day I get up early, say my prayers, visit with patients and with the new babies and their families. It’s a privilege to be with people at profound moments. Then I go to mass and have lunch in the hospital cafeteria. After lunch I need to rest because of the MS. Around 4:00 the other nuns come back from work, we say our prayers, eat dinner together and spend the evening talking. It’s been a great life to live in community with women who are so smart, are wonderful leaders and care for one another and for the world.

“I love this City and I love my work and I love my life. I try to be a good citizen. I don’t litter and I vote.”

What Say You? Here’s to Your Health!

“Right now the rest of the developed world is spending less money and getting better health care,” said Marcia Angell M.D. testifying for Single-Payer Health Care at the Senate Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Hearing.

Health Insurance is on the national agenda because it’s breaking the national economy. But it is also a highly personal and individual problem. Are you worried about your health care? If you are, stay healthy. It’s your best option. Healthy people can buy health insurance. Anyone deemed a risk by the insurers pays higher costs for the same coverage. People who are ill often lose their health insurance.

Entering the debate is Physicians for a National Health Plan, a single-issue organization dedicated to education and advocacy for comprehensive, universal, single payer health insurance. Founded in 1987 by David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, both primary care physicians and both professors at Harvard. PNHP now has 17,000 members, 900 in the Los Angeles area. (www.PNHP.org)

Santa Monica physicians Matt Hendrickson, Gene Oppenheim, Geoff White, Nancy Greep and Steve Tarzynski, joining thousands of American physicians frustrated by insurance companies getting in the way of providing good care for patients, started a Santa Monica chapter of PNHP. Sheila Kuehl, the author of the groundbreaking bill for single payer in CA, twice passed by both houses of the CA legislature and twice vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger, spoke at their first event.

Dr. Hendrickson, (matt@singlepayer.org) says, “We need single payer. We are the only developed nation with a for profit health insurance system. The current proposals in the House and Senate bills do provide some relief. They will remove pre-existing conditions as an opportunity for health insurers to refuse coverage and there may be a public option open to some people. At the same time most Americans will be required to buy insurance, which will hugely benefit the insurance companies.”

“Tragic and touching,” is how Dr. Hendrickson characterized his volunteer work at the Forum for the RAM (Remote Area Medicine) event. “People waited all night, sleeping on bleachers that had been set up in the parking lot, for a chance to get free medical service. This was a sad first for California and we must do better.”

“The American health system in uniquely expensive and inflationary. Last year we spent about $2.5 trillion on health care and costs are growing much faster than the background inflation rate. Our system is unsustainable. And, if that weren’t enough, we don’t get anywhere near our money’s worth.” said Dr. Angell, PNHP member, Harvard Medical School Faculty and former Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine.

The Health Insurance debate is central to our nation’s economic future and to our personal futures. In this country with its well-trained physicians, its great medical schools and its impressive history of contributions to medicine we have every reason to expect the best in health care. But we need more than training the best doctors; we need the best access.

Speaking to that point, on May 5, 2009, Dr. Margaret Flowers and seven other doctors went to D.C. The Senate Finance Committee had convened a round table of 15 experts. PNHP had requested a seat at the round table and Committee Chairman Senator Baucus had refused. He did not include any advocate for single payer. So they went to our nation’s capitol to testify. Not only were they not allowed to speak, they were arrested. You can watch the un-American spectacle of Senator Baucus calling in the Capitol police to arrest the physicians as they stood at the hearing and requested to speak to the committee. (YouTube)

Our president said, on July 22, 2009, “I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.” Barack Obama

What Say You? Are you healthy? Do you worry about health insurance?
What do you think we should do?