Man who is symbol of protest knows nothing about it
By Carol Gentry
6/12/2008 © Florida Health News
It still isn’t clear who’s behind the “People for Choice Health Care Coalition,” an anonymous group sending out scary cards to fight reform of the Medicare payment system for medical equipment. But one mystery surrounding the group's mail-out to elderly voters around West Palm Beach has been solved:
The poster child for the campaign -- a white-haired man in a wheelchair -- is Richard Harley, 85, a retired real estate broker in Bartow. He said he has never heard of the People for Choice Health Care Coalition. Mr. Harley says he doesn’t know anything about the pending change in payments for medical equipment. Nor does he object to it, having received his own power wheelchair for free through Medicare and his military coverage, provided to him as a veteran of World War II.
He allowed his granddaughter, a professional photographer, to take pictures of him and post them for sale over the Internet, he said. As for why the group chose him, he said with a laugh, “I guess it was my good looks.”
The whole curious episode came to light after the cards were delivered to residents of the massive Century Village complex in Deerfield Beach the last week of May. When resident Adele Becker took the card out of her mailbox, she did a double-take: The man in the photo, she thought, was her late husband Morris, who died last August in a Boca Raton nursing home. She couldn’t figure out how the group behind the mail-out got the photo, but she assumed it was taken last year at the nursing home. She said he was dressed in his favorite red sweater and she recognized his eyeglasses.
The card demanded a stop to the competitive bidding process for medical equipment, including power wheelchairs, home-care hospital beds, oxygen concentrators and much else. The experiment is being tried in 10 areas where spending is especially high, including South Florida and metro Orlando, beginning July 1.
By putting equipment up for bids, Medicare has been able to get discounts approaching 30 percent, officials say. That means savings for both taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries, who generally pay 20 percent of the cost unless they have supplemental coverage.
One striking example of the savings is for a power wheelchair. As of July 1, it will cost about $2,750 in Orlando, but more than $4,000 in Tampa, Jacksonville and most other parts of Florida. See “Medicare discovers free market…”
The losing bidders are not giving up the fight. They have mobilized a protest to Congress, where many members are calling on their leaders to delay the project for a year to study whether it’s fair. The mail-out that has Mr. Harley’s photo on it is apparently part of that lobbying effort, although the industry association denies knowledge of it and there is no record of a group operating under that name.
It’s not clear whether the card that went out in West Palm Beach also was mailed in other districts where the new pricing system is taking effect. In any event, it warns that medical equipment will be shipped in from China, implying that low bidders’ products will be substandard.
The card that Mrs. Becker received urged her to protest the bidding process by calling Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat who represents her Congressional district. Mrs. Becker called Wexler's office, but her protest concerned her belief that the lobbying group was using her late husband’s image. Florida Health News’ Washington correspondent, Susan Jaffe, heard about the incident there while working on a story about the change in equipment payments.
Her story about the mail-out, quoting Mrs. Becker as saying the photo was of her late husband, was published on Monday. By Monday night, though, someone notified Florida Health News that the photo on the card had come from an online image distributor, www.istockphoto.com.
Florida Health News called the online company and from there got in touch with the photographer, Andi Berger of Winter Haven. She said the man in the wheelchair was her grandfather, who let her post his photo online so that she could make some money from it. He said he didn’t have any knowledge of who bought and used the picture.
Ms. Berger, a 29-year-old mother of three, said her grandfather’s picture has been sold and used hundreds of times. She also sells photos of her twin 8-year-old girls and her son, 11. “We’ve been driving down the road and see a billboard, and the kids will say, ‘Oh my gosh there’s Grampa.’ It’s a great surprise,” Ms. Berger said.
On Wednesday, Florida Health News told Mrs. Becker that what she had thought was her late husband was instead Mr. Harley, who lives with his wife of many years in the home he built for them after World War II in Bartow, a small town in Polk County. “I’m amazed,” she said. “This is a clone” of Morris.
Mr. Harley said that if the photo had shown more of him Mrs. Becker wouldn’t have taken it for her late husband, since Mr. Harley’s left leg was amputated several years ago above the knee. But the photo was cropped in close so that the empty pants leg doesn't show.
He wasn’t perturbed by the fuss and said he hopes Mrs. Becker will come for a visit. “I’d like to meet her if she ever gets to Bartow,” he said.
Efforts to track down the source of the mail-out have so far been fruitless. The permit number on the cards belongs to a company that handles bulk mail-outs for a fee, according to the postmaster’s office in West Palm Beach.
--Carol Gentry, Editor of Florida Health News, can be reached at Carol.Gentry@FloridaHealthNews.org.
