The problem-solving spirit heals friction and contentiousness. Perhaps Moy can bring her consensus-building skills to Washington. She's a home health care worker for Cooperative Home Care Associates, headquartered on149th Street in the South Bronx, a couple of doors down from a pawn shop. Oramas assists a cancer patient who is in her mid-eighties and was near death two years ago. Oramas helped that happen by keeping a watchful eye on what her patient ate and on the medicine she took.
Home care is one of the most important and most poorly paid of the health professions.
The growth in America's over-80 population demands more devotion such as Oramas's. Yet pressure to cut health care spending means less money for the tender mercies that help the fragile stay as healthy and as independent as they can be. Cooperative Home Care Associates is what happens when a caring and entrepreneurial mind thinks about solving more than one problem at a time. It is the brainchild of Rick Surpin, who has spent his life working on the problems of the poor. In the mid-1980s, he saw that the need for more and better paid home care workers coincided with the desire of poor people, particularly those on welfare, for decent jobs.