Organizations Seek Single-Payer Universal Health Coverage

Harry and Louise lied.

That message is being hammered home by a coalition of health care organizations intent on enacting statewide single-payer universal coverage.

The Spokane-based Single Payer Coalition of Eastern Washington and a Seattle-based combine called Health Care Now! want to place an initiative on Washington’s ballot in November 1998.

“In 1994 two paid actors read insurance industry lies on TV over and over again,” charges a pamphlet circulated by the Single Payer coalition. “So we said no to national health care and millions lost health insurance. The rest of us found ourselves enrolled in ‘managed care.’ Managed care means Wall Street dictates the bottom-line dollar to be spent on your health.”

Dr. Ellen Pierce is de facto president of the Eastern Washington coalition. The Spokane pathologist, who authored the original version of the initiative petition, says a draft is being circulated for input from coalition members. In Seattle, Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, president of Health Care Now!, said, “We are putting together a fiscal impact study that will show small businesses will benefit from the changes we want to make in health care coverage.”

Said Pierce, “I think Republicans and Democrats should be equally supportive. Everyone - employers and employees - will pay into a single state health care trust fund, and it will cover everyone.”

In effect, the single payer universal system would eliminate insurance industry middlemen who now dictate health care coverage, Pierce said.

A Health Care Now! brochure states: “No longer would health care dollars be used for insurance company marketing, underwriting, profits, or exorbitant executive salaries.”

Magazine features Joel

“Good taste is like good manners,” says John Ferris, president of Joel, 165 S. Post. “It makes life more beautiful. To use a beautifully crafted utensil or glassware is like holding art.”

Taste has made Joel an institution in downtown Spokane for gift and furniture shoppers from throughout the Inland Northwest for going on half a century.

Through continued adherence to the original concept that design matters, Spokane’s oldest surviving gift store now has earned a place in the national spotlight. Joel is featured in Gifts & Stationery Business Magazine, which monthly selects an outstanding representative of the industry to profile.

Joel was founded in 1950 by Joel Ferris Sr. and his wife, Mary Jean Rosenberry Ferris, in a tiny nook just 13 feet wide. Today it occupies two turn-of-the-century buildings totaling 30,000 square feet, and the founders are still active in the business.

“It’s means something that we’ve been around 47 years,” says John Ferris, co-manager with brother Toby Ferris. “And yet, it means nothing.

“A lot of people have said we are like an institution, which, flattering as that may be, takes us for granted a little bit, too,” says John Ferris. “When one is an institution, that seems to imply that you don’t have work hard. And we do.

“As Dad would say, you are only as good as your last well-served customer. Your next customer is coming in for the first time. If you don’t take care of them just as well … “It’s a small town,” he says. “You can’t get away with being very high and mighty.

“We have been very vigilant,” he says. “As owners, we ourselves work on the floor as much as possible, and we care about downtown and the larger picture. There are so few old-line merchants who still survive downtown.”

Ferris adds: “We’re not for just the very rich, as some would have you believe. We are for everybody. We carry everything from a $1.50 greeting card to a $1,500 sofa, and up.”

Business income increases

The gross income of Washington businesses in this year’s first quarter rose roughly 11 percent over the same period a year ago.

There are no local breakouts of the statewide figures. But analyst Mike Gowrylow of the State Revenue Department advises that these figures are heavily skewed by the Puget Sound basin business boom, as reflected in retail sales tax data, for which there are breakouts.

These figures show total taxable retail sales rose 7.3 percent statewide. The metropolitan Seattle counties of King and Snohomish had respective sales gains of 9.4 and 13.3 percent.

Spokane gained just 3.3 percent.

“Compared to the state, retailing in Spokane looks very slow,” said Gowrylow, “which would appear to reflect a sluggish local economy and lower level of consumer buying power.”

, DataTimes MEMO: Associate Editor Frank Bartel writes a notes column each Wednesday. If you have business items of regional interest for future columns, call 459-5467 or fax 459-5482.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Frank Bartel The Spokesman-Review