Flynn's Harp: Impact of two Seattle doctors on lives of children (1-13-10)

This is a story about a pair of Seattle physicians, one just retired from his non-profit role and the other engaged in what he describes as his last campaign. They weren’t known to each other and were unrelated in their practices, but they were united in their respective focuses on commitments to children and left enduring imprints, one across this country and the other to the far corners of the globe.

Abe Bergman once described the rewards of his half century as a pediatrician as satisfying “the passions of my bleeding heart by practicing ‘political medicine’ on behalf of underserved kids.”

What Abraham Bergman, M.D., age 77, describes as “practicing political medicine” means that over much of his five decades of practice, he spent his time twisting the arms of a variety of powerful Washington State lawmakers on behalf of children’s issues that required federal legislation or attention.

For Don VanNimwegen, guiding surgical teams to far corners of the globe on behalf of Healing the Children brought satisfaction not only for the impact on the lives of youngsters operated on but also for the impact his efforts had on attitudes of populations to whom Americans “are not so welcome.”In a sense, he brought his own form of “political medicine.”

VanNimwegen, 69, who retired from his career as an anesthesiologist at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle about the same time as Bergman retired from his pediatrics role, was feted a few weeks ago by Healing the Children supporters after he announced he was retiring from that involvement.

Through the array of campaigns in which Bergman was involved, he helped bring about Congressional actions that ranged from changes in product-safety oversight to a package of poison-prevention bills to laws governing fire-retardant clothing for children.

 In 2002, as he was stepping down from his role as chief of pediatrics at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, Bergman says he “began looking around for one last time at bat on behalf of a children’s advocacy project.”

His “last at bat” has been an effort to bring about national legislation designed to improve the lives of children in foster care. He took the idea to Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who created bipartisan legislation that was passed and finally signed into law two years ago as Fostering Connection to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act.

It will  help hundreds of thousands of children and youth in foster care by promoting permanent families for them through relative guardianship and adoption and improving education and health care until age 21, as well as offering American Indian children important federal protections and support.

A provision in the legislation that each state must come up with a plan on how to implement the foster children’s healthcare requirement has taken some time, which Bergman described as a “lonely vigil” of “cajoling state officials to do what they’ve promised to do anyhow but just haven’t gotten around to doing.”

Now a key step toward bringing those state programs about will take place in Seattle Feb. 11-12 when Medicaid and children’s welfare representatives from 10 states gather for a roundtable planning session for strategies to set up statewide health systems for children in foster care. The event is under the co-sponsorship of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and Seattle-based Casey Family Programs.

“The moral issue is transcendent because these are children for whom the state has become the parent,” Bergman explains. “Through no fault of their own, they’ve been taken from their homes after being abused and terribly neglected and become wards of the state.”

I asked him if much of the problem of healthcare for foster kids wouldn’t be resolved if healthcare legislation is approved by Congress in the coming weeks.

“The issue of foster health care is way too small to be considered in the national health legislation,” he replied. “What happens with Medicaid does also affect foster kids, because Medicaid is what funds their health care.” 

But Bergman’s activities on behalf of kids extend way beyond mere political activism. He’s been an outspoken advocate of adoptions by retirees, particularly of special-needs children. He became an advocate of retiree adoptions after he and his wife adopted two youngsters, one in 1997 and the other in 1999, from Siberia.

And his quest for a downtown Seattle “play garden” for kids with disabilities will come about this spring.

In VanNimwegen’s 15-year involvement with the Spokane-based national non-profit Healing the Children, which has chapters in 23 states, he guided as many as four medical-team trips a year while overseeing the medical-supplies warehouse at Group Health that kept the teams supplied.

While VanNimwegen handled the anesthesia role for 800 surgeries and organized more than 1,800 operations in the array of countries to which he guided the medical teams to deal with the surgical needs of the kids, he indicates he was perhaps most struck by the impact on attitudes that were changed by the medical teams.

“We were in Pakistan one year and operated on 50 kids with cleft palates,” VanNimwegen recalls. “The guy we dealt with at the U.S. Embassy told us it was the most positive thing that had happened that year to impact our relations with Pakistan.”

And he recalls working aboard a U.S. Navy ship that was providing aide to Indonesians following the 2004 Tsunami. He says a poll of Indonesians prior to the disastrous Tsunami showed 70 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the U.S.

“After we completed our medical work following the Tsunami, another poll showed it was just reversed,” he says. “It showed 70 percent thought favorably about us.”

I’ve known both Bergman and VanNimwegen since the early ‘70s and asked VanNimwegen if he had heard of Bergman. He said he hadn’t so I told him about Bergman’s activities on behalf of children.

“Sounds like he worked from the top down while I did my work from the bottom up,” VanNimwegen chuckled.