One Corps Health Care Action Day - Ideas?

Greetings all!

I was originally going to write this ONLY for the Chapel Hill, NC area folks, as we had our first meetup this week, and this was going to be the follow-up.  However, I think that the advantage of the internet is that you can instantly have opinions from around the world, not just your one little corner.  So, with that in mind, I'm going to list what I think are the major Headings of Action for Health Care and some of the ideas that were presented last night by Chapel Hill One Corps members.  

I'd ask that all of you contribute new Headings or Ideas to the mix in the comments and I will update the post as time permits.

I posted this previously at johnedwards.com, but I was hoping that some locals would have ideas for me.

Okay, to me, all of our ideas could be broken down into two major Headings: Hand-up and Hand-out.  I take these headings from the idea of giving people a "Hand-up and not a Hand-out", so in this case the Hand-out is educational/advocational literature, while the Hand-up is physical help.

Hand-up

1. Volunteer at a free clinic in your area.
   
   
2. Work with dentists to provide some sort of free check-ups or at-cost dental work for a day.
   
   
3. Work with the elderly on the new enrollment for Medicare prescription drug program.
   
   
4. Do something for mental health parity (any ideas?).
   
   
5. Preventive Care/Nutrition presentation to younger kids (maybe show Super Size Me and provide healthy snacks?)

Hand-out

1. Spread the word about Medicaid/Medicare/S-CHIP for children (nearly 3/4 of uninsured children are eligible for one of these programs).
   
   
2. Draw attention to the uninsured through effective displays (people in blue-collar working clothes with big signs saying "I work full time, and have no health insurance" kind of thing, or a line of kids in black or red shirts to display what percentage have insurance and what percentage don't).
   
   
3. Identify the top fears and myths about "universal health care" and address these; also, address the fact that we already pay for universal health care, we just don't get it.
   
   
4. Make the issue immediate.  Find local people who are suffering because of bad health insurance (50% of bankruptcies are related to health expenses and 76% of those people have insurance when they become ill or injured).
   
   
5. Profile other countries, especially the cost-per-capita and the quality of care.

So, that is it.  At this point I would also like to thank all the people who came to our first Social, Meet & Greet One Corps meeting, and I promise the next one will be run much better!