Members from Organizing for America in Story County delivered a petition with more than 3,000 signatures to the office of Rep. Tom Latham, R-Ia, Wednesday urging the Ames’ congressman to support health care reform efforts.

Jarret Heil, a staff member in the Latham’s Ames office, received the petition as Latham was not in Ames on Wednesday.

The group collected 3,356 signatures from throughout Iowa’s fourth-congressional district. Jan Bauer, co-chair for Organizing for America in Story County, said signatures were collected mostly by going door to door throughout the district or holding house parties.

“Our message today is please Congressman Latham fight for a real, meaningful health care reform when you return to Washington D.C.,” Bauer said. “Iowans are suffering and we need change now.”

While talking to people about health care reform, Jenny Huntington, of Ames, said she met a woman who did not have health insurance and she and her husband had to put off an operation because they couldn’t afford it.

“If he can’t have a cataract operation, then he can’t work. And that just seems backwards,” she said. “How can we call that adequate health insurance?”

In a previous interview with the Daily on Aug. 19, Latham said that although he believes there are problems with the health care system, he believes most Iowans are happy with their health insurance. The objective should be to find ways to get 10 million people covered that would purchase health insurance if they had the chance.

“The poorest people have actually, through Medicaid, have very good insurance. You have people above the poverty level that simply can’t afford it so what you could do is have refundable tax credits for those people if in fact they purchase health insurance policies to help them pay for it,” he said.

If there was a government run plan, Latham said over half the people with health insurance from their employers would switch over to the public plan, causing there to be an uncompetitive marketplace.

Part of the plan Latham said he would like to see is one where families in the same profession go into a pool together to give themselves bargaining power against insurance companies.

Bob Gitchell, a retired orthopedic surgeon from Ames, said he would endorse the reforms that Latham supports but said they were “like window dressing on a problem that’s much larger than that.”

One reform that Gitchell said should be in any bill is making sure insurance companies can’t deny customers coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

“Everybody knows pre-existing conditions and it ought to be outlawed,” he said. “You ought to never be able lose your insurance because you change your job or you get sick and really need insurance.”

Although Gitchell said CEO’s of insurance companies are making too much money and more coverage needs to be added, from a medical perspective, tort reform needs to be included in any bill.

“Going through that era as an orthopedic surgeon, a very high risk specialty, every decision I made was based on ‘Am I going to be second guessed?’ If I don’t get this test and this turns out this way, what defense do I have to say well I probably should have done that and the outcome would have been different,” he said.

Gitchell said young doctors don’t think about not getting extra tests now because it is so imbedded in the system.

Heil said although Latham did voice opposition to the original HR3200 bill, his final decision hasn’t been made on how he would vote on a bill.

“We don’t know what the final product is,” Heil said. “He’s going to be closely monitoring it and listening to constituents between now and when we have final product.”