Honoring Dr. Linda Farley, Advocate for Single-Payer

The day before Barack Obama spoke to the AMA, I went to a memorial service for a wonderful doctor who spent her whole life caring for patients and the last several decades pleading for a more rational and humane health care system.

Her name was Dr. Linda Farley.

She practiced medicine where it mattered most: on the Navajo Reservation, in the inner city, in rural America, in Jamaica.

My wife, a pediatric nurse who works at Head Start, would often tell me how incredible Linda was, and her husband Gene, also a doctor, since they’d volunteer their time, even in their late seventies, at free health clinics in Madison for those without health insurance.

She and Gene did more to promote the just cause of single-payer health care than any couple I know.

How sad that the day after her service Barack Obama felt compelled to be so defensive at the AMA, where he said his public option proposal was not “a Trojan horse for a single-payer system” and where he tried to allay fears of “socialized medicine.”

Dr. Linda Farley favored socialized medicine and was a proud member of Physicians for a National Health Program. She and Gene would travel anywhere and everywhere, including to Washington, to press the issue.

Many people talked about her commitment to single payer at her memorial service at the Friends House in Madison, packed to overflowing with 350 people.

One of her relatives, who ironically worked for the hospital industry, said he’d often discuss the issue with her, telling her that single payer is “never going to happen in this country.”

And he recalled her response: “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

It still is.

She came to her politics naturally.

“I grew up in the Depression in a blue collar family with an artistic mother, whose wide reading, introspective thinking, gift for language and expression, and speculation about the world provided the base for sharing friendship and the transmission of much wisdom,” she wrote in 1999 in a statement reprinted in the memorial service program. “My father, self-educated, ran a gas station. He was an old-world gentleman and a New Deal Democrat. He treated everyone with respect and taught me about loving. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were heroes of my childhood.”

As dedicated as a doctor as she was, and as ardent an activist, she was more than the sum of those two roles.

She was an all-around loving person.

Several speakers at the Friends House told how she would speak to you as though you were the most important person in the world. And she meant it. For instance, when she saw my wife a couple months ago at a crowded fundraiser in her honor, she exclaimed “Jeanie!” and gave her a big hug and spoke with her for several minutes, though there were a lot of people, including elected officials, who were there to pay homage.

At the memorial service on Sunday, one member of the Friends House told how Linda had counseled her when she was doubting whether she could be a Friend, since she and another Quaker were often at odds with each other.

Said Linda, touching the cheek of the worried Quaker: “Honey, you don’t need to like everybody.”

But Linda seemed to. She looked for the “light,” for the good in people, as Gene and others testified.

A more compassionate person you will not find.

And she was philosophical, too.

“The tapestry is not perfect,” she wrote at the end of her statement in the program. “The Navajo rug weavers left a thread to the edge representing the imperfections and the unfinished nature of creation. And thus it is with mine . . .”