Dem Rep. Speier Asks Unemployed Woman...To Speak At Town Hall

[babylonsister]

This should be done more often-get personal!

Arthur Delaney
[e-mail] | HuffPost Reporting

Mary Duffy Speaks Out At Jackie Speier Town Hall
First Posted: 08-25-09 04:55 PM | Updated: 08-25-09 05:26 PM


At a town hall event on Sunday in San Mateo County, Calif., Rep. Jackie Speier (D) broke from the question-and-answer format to ask a specially invited guest to stand up and talk.

"She speaks to the real life experience of people and I think sometimes we forget what the real life experiences are," the congresswoman said. Mary Duffy then took the microphone to explain why she is passionate about health care reform.

"In the past 20 years I've been a small business owner and I've been through breast cancer three times," Duffy said, "and I can tell you right now that the challenge of trying to find insurance was worse than going through any of the cancer treatment that I went through."

The Huffington Post interviewed Duffy last week as part of our series on regular people dealing with unemployment and lack of health care. Afterwards, Speier's office, with whom Duffy had previously communicated about her situation, asked her to speak at the town hall.

Duffy explained that she was only able to get an insurance policy nine years after her first bout with cancer, and that she'd gone without from 1992 to 1997. Within six months of obtaining a policy, she was diagnosed again. She said her insurance company claimed she'd known she had cancer when she signed up -- and immediately tried to get rid of her (it failed). After her third diagnosis in 2005, Duffy said her treatments left her too exhausted to continue running her small business, which provided food service consulting to colleges and universities.

"In 2007 I was really lucky, took a job with a big company in my industry. It was great. My insurance premium went down from $800 a month to $110," she told the crowd. "I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was great until I was laid off.

"Now I'm on the end of my COBRA, coming up in December. I haven't been able to find work again. And I'm not even going to try to look for medical insurance when that runs out in December because I simply know I won't be able to get it unless we pass this kind of reform."

Duffy said she was swarmed after the event ended.

"'Thank you for standing up there and telling your story,'" people told her. "There was a very articulate nurse practitioner and she grabbed me and said, 'I just wanted to thank you, that's all.' I don't know who it was...a lot of people came up and told me about problems with cancers in their family."

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/25/mary-duffy-speaks-out-at_n_268511.html

[alittlelark]

1. Speier is a classy lady.

There has been quite a bit of tragedy in her life.

Jonestown

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/16/INGEM3070L1.DTL

When it opens, all the agony comes rushing back: She is there on the oppressively humid jungle airstrip in her polka-dot sundress and platform shoes, a congressional aide with clipboard in hand, rushing anxious defectors onto a waiting plane. Then the ambush, as Jonestown's henchmen open fire.

She feels five bullets pierce her body, one blowing away a huge chunk of her thigh. She sees her boss and mentor, Rep. Leo Ryan, dead on the tarmac. She chills as flies and mosquitoes buzz around her wounds. She sips rum to deaden the searing pain. Left for dead with a handful of other wounded survivors throughout the night, she thinks of her parents back in the Bay Area and tape records them a farewell message.

On the cataclysmic night of Nov. 18, 1978, the Rev. Jim Jones dispatched the death squad to the airstrip and then led more than 900 of his flock -- most of them from the Bay Area and about a third of them children -- into a "white night" that became the worst mass murder/suicide in modern history.


Her husbands (an ER Physician) accident

http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-27/news/mn-16007_1_assemblywoman-jackie-speier


Auto Accident Kills Husband of Jackie Speier


January 27, 1994

SACRAMENTO — The husband of Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame) has died of injuries he suffered in an automobile accident, her office announced Wednesday.

Dr. Steven K. Sierra, 52, who married Speier in 1987, died late Tuesday night after a crash several hours earlier in which he was broadsided by a driver who apparently ran a red light at a San Mateo intersection. Speier, 43, has represented part of San Francisco and San Mateo counties for seven years.

Sierra earned his medical degree with honors from UC San Francisco in 1973 and was an emergency room doctor.

The driver of the other car was identified by authorities as Thomas Rivera III, 24, of Burlingame. He suffered minor injuries. No citation was issued, but an investigation into the accident was continuing.

Speier recently dropped out of the secretary of state's race because she is pregnant with the couple's second child.

[babylonsister]

2. OMG, I hadn't connected those Jonestown dots, and I had no

idea about her husband. This woman has been through so much.

Thanks for the memory jog and info.

I like her even more!