INITIATIVE GAINING MOMENTUM

[Guest guest]

Last week I informed you of WSCC's enthusiastic support and organized

effort to collect signatures. They have implimented major programs

to begin collecting signatures.

More good news. All 600+ members of the Optometric profession have

now been mailed collection kits. The last 50 kits went out in the

mail today. I am anxiosly awaiting a response, which I expect to

take another week or two.

We are now begining to contact the Dental profession. The Dental

profession has historically been very resistant to managed care, so I

expect a friendly reception. We will begin sending out Dental kits

next Tuesday. They have 2300 members, but we currently can only

afford to send out a couple hundred kits.

We are currently calling all non-collecting DC offices in Oregon.

Don't be surprised if you get called if we haven't received any

signatures sheets from your office. For those of you who aren't

participating, we are going to try to convince you (in a nice way) to

get involved. We could sure use your help. This has been a very

slow, but very successful program. At least 150 DC offices are now

collecting signatures. Some DCs have our collection kit sitting on

the doc's desk, but have not yet started collecting signatures.

Please start collecting now!! We have 6 weeks left.

Please send all filled signature sheets in each week. Those who are

collecting are doing a great job, keep up the good work.

Now, everyone wants to know how the collection campaign is going. To

be sure, it has been a slow process and we have lost 3 valuable weeks

trying to get the profession on board. We will not receive the first

installment from WSCC until the middle of next week. So, our numbers

right now are not what I had hoped. But I had based that on the

assumption that most of the profession was quietly collecting

signatures. Now, we have at least 3 times more collection sites than

we had one week ago, so the tide has changed,, unfortunately,

receiving the results of today's work takes about 2-3 weeks. The law

requires that we have 67,000 signatures, but to make sure we have

enough we need 80,000. If we have 400 total collectors (WSCC, DCs,

OPs, and Dentists) then we only need 200 signatures per collector.

It is impossible to determine now, but I believe we will have our 400

collectors within two weeks. So hold the course everybody. Dig in

for the long haul, it's too early to give up,, and it would be a

shame to give up before the battle is over.

More next week.