Residents send health care reform recommendations to Obama

The results are in and the word is out to the Obama-Biden transition team: Sonoma wants sweeping health care reform.
At a Sonoma Valley community discussion last week, part of a nationwide response to invitations from the Obama-Biden transition team to communities throughout the country to speak up on health care, nearly 70 people spoke out individually and worked together in groups to express the problem and recommend solutions to what many described as a broken system.
The conclusion reached by the meeting’s host Bill Boerum, Chair of the Sonoma Valley Health Care District, after listening to all spoken comments and reviewing the submissions by five work groups, is that, “The temper of the participants was emphatically for sweeping and comprehensive change,” he said, “not an incremental approach. Half measures or hybrid approaches were not favored by this assembly.” Group leader Celina Briggs agreed, “We weren’t comfortable with piecemeal work.”