Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992 TAG: 9202090220
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
HIS CAPITAL CRUSADE IS PERSONAL ONE
IN HIS FIRST day as a novice lobbyist, Frank Smusz went from feeling like an outsider with a noble cause to an insider with a more realistic view of how Virginia's legislative system, started nearly 375 years ago, works.It started as a flippant suggestion from an insurance executive:
"Frank, you ought to register as a lobbyist."
For months, Frank Smusz resisted the challenge.
Although he was battling the executive's company, and although he believed state law should compel the company to pay for his wife's cancer treatment, Frank hardly thought he could lobby the legislature to change the law.
Lobbying was for people with a closet full of silk suits, an expense account for every occasion and a condo within walking distance of the Capitol - not for a man who gets up early every morning to feed his children's pony.
Anyhow, what influence could a working man like him possibly have among Virginia's politically powerful? He wasn't even sure how to find the General Assembly.
And besides, between caring for his cancer-stricken wife, Lorraine, and their two sons, maintaining a full-time job as a buildings-and-grounds supervisor for Botetourt County and freelancing weekends as an electrical contractor, who would have time?
Still, the suggestion nagged at Frank Smusz's mind.
Why not at least look into it?
In November, as Lorraine continued to improve, Frank did just that, calling the secretary of the commonwealth's office and registering as one of 850 state lobbyists. In so doing, he was taking their yearlong battle against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Virginia to another level.
"It was mostly symbolic, just so when Blue Cross scans the list and sees my name, they can say, `There's that S.O.B. again,' " the 34-year-old transplanted New Yorker says. Even better, when asked what interest group he represented, he listed his wife.
Frank had no idea doing so would distinguish him as the only registered lobbyist in the state who represents just one person, let alone a spouse. All the other lobbyists are affiliated with associations, corporations or special-interest groups.
As a lobbyist, however, Frank stayed inactive until January.
That was when he got word that a new bill was in the works that might help other cancer patients avoid what happened to them, when Blue Cross refused to pay for Lorraine's treatment.
Still, doubts remained: Would he be wasting his time? Or could he alone make a difference? Would the experience be disheartening? Or inspire him to do more?
"Frank, you ought to register as a lobbyist."
The time had come to take on the challenge.
\ 4:30 a.m. The morning starts with hay for Sunny, the family pony.
Frank is bundled up in a sweat suit and ski jacket. By the light of a waning moon, he braces against a harsh wind to scatter the feed in Sunny's front-yard pasture. Sunny doesn't stir.
At this hour, not even ponies care.
Soon afterward, Frank is dressing in a gray striped shirt, red power tie and charcoal suit just returned from the cleaners - a contrast to the blue jeans and work shirts he usually wears. Today he wants to look his best.
Lorraine also is awake, to wish him luck. Their sons, Brian, 6, and Kevin, 3, still are asleep.
\ 6 a.m. The station wagon is already fueled. For himself, coffee from Hardee's in Daleville.
\ 7:30 a.m. The sun finally rises as he drives north on Interstate 81.
Frank is wide awake with anticipation. He proudly shows off his business cards, printed the day before. Each reads: Frank Smusz, Registered Lobbyist. He isn't sure he'll need them, but figures he better have them just in case.
\ 9:15 a.m. In downtown Richmond, he pulls into a parking garage next to St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where Robert E. Lee worshiped during the Civil War.
A relative newcomer to the South, Frank moved to Botetourt County in 1986 from Long Island and still retains a thick New York accent. "Just think of all the eyebrows that will be raised," he jokes. "I'm sure they'll be thinking, `Why doesn't he move back North?' "
\ 9:20 a.m. Waiting for Frank inside the General Assembly Building is Mary Jo Kahn, chairwoman of the Virginia Breast Cancer Foundation, a group that advocates breast cancer education and research. Concerned over the same issue, they had arranged to tag-team lobby for an hour to help Frank learn his way around.
Kahn gives him a button to wear on his lapel: A red circle and slash strike out the words "breast cancer."
\ 9:30 a.m. First stop: Bo Trumbo's office.
First lesson: Even with your hometown senator who knows you on a first-name basis, get used to waiting.
"Bo is with someone. Would you like to see Loretta?" Trumbo's secretary, Denzil Lyne, says. Similar lines will follow Frank throughout the day. "Do you have a card?" she asks.
Frank flashes a grin and hands it over.
At this point, Frank still doesn't know what bill is on the block, what it contains or what committee it is headed for. He isn't even sure it has been introduced yet.
All he knows from having made a few phone calls is that the bill has to do with breast cancer treatment and insurance, and who some of its backers are. With no lobbying contacts, he says, it is difficult to find out much more.
\ 9:40 a.m. Trumbo looks at Frank's card. It's not often that a senator sees a business card from a lobbyist representing his wife. "I'm impressed," he says.
A friend of the couple's before they made headlines, Trumbo asks about Lorraine.
"At this point, we're cautiously optimistic," Frank replied.
Trumbo laughs loud. "You sound like a politician, Frank."
He fills Frank in. House Bill No. 539 sponsored by Del. David Brickley of Woodbridge and Sen. Jane Woods of Fairfax. As proposed, it would require insurance companies in Virginia to offer customers the option of buying additional insurance for bone-marrow transplant treatments for breast cancer - the treatment Lorraine had.
Trumbo says he signed on in support of the bill, which was introduced the previous day, but he warns that it was sent to the House Committee on Corporations, Insurance and Banking, where the insurance lobby is entrenched.
"You're going to have a fight on your hands," he says.
Despite the new surroundings, Frank seems at ease, his legs crossed comfortably, as he pulls documents from his overstuffed leather briefcase. Maybe it is the familiar subject. On cancer at least, Frank knows his stuff.
One in nine women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. More than 1,000 women in Virginia will die from it this year. Another 4,000 will be diagnosed with the disease. He and Kahn are bombarding Trumbo with the pitch.
"You don't have to preach to me. This guy's on the choir," Trumbo says.
His advice: Lobby the committee members. The bill has to get out of committee before it can go anywhere else. He slides a pocket-sized blue book across his desk: the booklet lists all senators and delegates, including their telephone numbers and photographs.
"Ah, this has pictures," Frank says, flipping the pages.
\ 10:10 a.m. Frank and Kahn settle next on Del. Gladys Keating of Fairfax, who is backing a resolution to declare breast cancer an emergency in Virginia, and who is not in her office.
Instead, they see Gloria Hare, her aide. This stop is more for Kahn's benefit, but Frank is happy to make any contacts he can. You never know when they will come back to help you, he says.
Later, he learns that Keating sits on the insurance and corporations committee.
\ 10:35 a.m. Sen. Virgil Goode of Rocky Mount isn't in, either.
Frank had heard Goode was interested in ensuring at least that state employees are covered for bone-marrow transplants, a benefit that workers in Maryland and North Carolina have.
In his own district, Goode had seen Sharon Davis, a state worker from Ferrum, also fight breast cancer and the state's insurer, Blue Cross, over her treatment.
Another aide, Brian Foster, runs interference. Typically vague - most aides seem to have little clue about where their legislators are or what they are working on - he says: "I'm not sure what he's doing. It's better to ask him."
Frank leaves his card.
\ 11:10 a.m. "They should be required to wear name tags."
Frank is on the first floor of the General Assembly building, thumbing through the legislative directory that Trumbo gave him earlier. Two committee meetings have just adjourned, and several dozen people are standing around in small groups talking.
Kahn has gone her separate way, and Frank doesn't recognize anyone, even with the directory. He had hoped to match some faces, maybe of bill sponsor Brickley or Goode, or the head of the corporations and insurance committee, Del. Lewis Parker of South Hill. "It's a disadvantage not knowing what they look like. If you can't get them in their offices, what do you do?"
Frank will spend much of his day in vain trying to match faces to names. To some, it would be disheartening, facing such odds and the high-priced insurance lobbyists who already know the game. An outsider hardly appears to stand a chance.
But former schoolboy hockey players are not the type to back down: "It would be easy to let someone else carry the torch, but I think that happens all too often."
\ 11:30 a.m. Still, Frank feels he has hit bottom. After two hours, the players and the process remain a mystery. A cold he has been fighting for days is starting to feel like the flu.
\ 11:45 a.m. But maybe not for long.
Frank is hoping to see Jane Woods, the Senate backer of the breast cancer bill. But her aide, Mary Hunter, says Woods will be busy until noon, and then will be hurrying to the Senate floor.
More lessons:
State senators are required to be on the Senate floor at noon each day, Hunter says. More importantly, she tells Frank that if he goes to the Senate gallery at that hour, he can have his senator formally introduce him to the full Senate.
\ 11:50 a.m. Outside the General Assembly Building, Frank runs into a television reporter from Richmond who had once done a story on Lorraine. They talk briefly before Frank heads for the Capitol.
A short time later, it occurs to Frank: He called the reporter by the wrong name. "I thought he was Richard Real," he admits, referring to the Richmond correspondent for Roanoke television station WDBJ, Channel 7.
\ Noon. "What do you do, correct him?"
From the balcony above the Senate floor, Frank has sent a note down to Trumbo, asking to be introduced. He is quiet and respectful, as if in a museum.
On Trumbo's turn to take the floor, his introduction is a short, upbeat synopsis of Lorraine's story and how it resulted in Frank's coming to Richmond. He uses words and phrases like "courageous," "ordeal" and "one-man crusade."
Only Trumbo gets it wrong.
He says "bone cancer transplants," instead of bone-marrow transplants. As a result, so does Lt. Gov. Don Beyer, presiding over the Senate, when he wishes Frank the customary good luck.
Frank stands and waves anyway. "I thought it was very nice," he says.
He'll talk to Bo later.
\ 12:30 p.m. Lunch. Chicken on white bread at the General Assembly canteen.
\ 1:15 p.m. Quiet as a library and oozing of bureaucracy, the State Corporation Commission's Bureau of Insurance is a different world from the buzzing Capitol a few blocks away.
Frank is being led through a labyrinth of work cubicles by Jo Anne Scott, who, in response to Frank's prodding, organized a public hearing this past summer on whether the state should set up an appeals panel for patients who are denied coverage of treatments that insurers deem experimental.
Frank wants to know more about a report Scott helped prepare following the hearing, about a survey on the number of claims denied by insurance companies in the past three years because they considered the treatments experimental.
Seventeen companies said they didn't keep such statistics.
One said it denied two claims. Another said four claims. Another: 1,000. But one last company reported 11,834 claims it denied.
Frank finds the number incredible and wants to know which company it was.
Scott is cordial, but no help. She can't release the names of the companies. They are part of the bureau's "working papers" and not open to the public, she says. Sorry.
Frank says he has a hunch nonetheless.
\ 1:45 p.m. This time it really is Richard Real.
On the way back to the General Assembly Building, Frank doesn't make the same mistake twice. The real Richard Real is headed in the same direction, on his way to cover a committee meeting. Real tells Frank to swing by a little later:
"I'll get my guy and we'll come outside for a quick sound bite."
\ 2:15 p.m. Back in the Senate offices, waiting to see Jane Woods, Frank is again paging through the directory. "It's a lot like baseball cards," he says. Frank keeps a sense of humor; he doesn't take himself or politics too seriously.
\ 2:45 p.m. "Give me three seconds," Woods says, as Frank sits on an elegantly upholstered sofa in her office. Her aides shuffle in with questions, papers to sign and telephone messages to relay.
\ 2:50 p.m. "My thinking on this bill is, it's something," Woods says, finally settling down with a cigarette and the door closed. Another lesson: Many of the bills at the General Assembly are introduced at the last minute just to get something on paper before deadline. They are far from finished.
Woods talks candidly. A year earlier, she spent the legislative session recovering from cancer therapy herself. Even wore a wig, and like Lorraine she also had to look elsewhere to pay for her treatment when Blue Cross deemed it experimental.
"It's like, well, we don't cover you if you're sick," she says.
Her hope now is that the bone-marrow transplant bill can be broadened to include other "experimental" medical treatments. If the medical world accepts a treatment, so should the insurance industry, she says.
For Woods, it is an issue that hits close to home: "If you're not rich, what do you do?" They both know the answer all too well, but Frank is the one who speaks it.
"You beg like we did; and if that doesn't work, you die."
\ 4 p.m. On a roll now.
David Brickley, the bill's House sponsor, doesn't keep Frank waiting. His reason for backing the bill also is clear: his wife, Lori, is fighting breast cancer. "It's really gotten to me," he says.
A former New Yorker as well, Brickley is very encouraging of Frank: "I tell you, one person can do it. Somebody with an interest and perseverance can get get something done.
"You don't need a whole army of high-paid lobbyists," he says.
\ 4:30 p.m. Virgil Goode doesn't keep Frank waiting either.
"Just being there today and standing up in the Senate was a good idea," Goode tells him. "It brings more awareness if nothing else."
He says state employees like Sharon Davis, the woman in his district who had to battle Blue Cross, should at least be covered. "Then, maybe it will have a trickle-down effect to other plans," he says.
\ 4:50 p.m. Bo is sorry.
"I sat down and I thought, what did I just say?" Bo Trumbo says, apologizing to Frank about flubbing his introduction. Frank wanted to thank Trumbo nonetheless.
Frank brings up Roanoke Sen. Brandon Bell, the blossoming lobbyist in him moving in for the kill. "Get him behind it," Frank urges of Trumbo's neighboring senator. And the committee on corporations and insurance: "Got any friends over there?" he asks.
Frank is feeling the glow.
9:45 p.m. The glow fades a bit on what seems like a longer drive home.
Frank is tired, but he stops at a convenience store near home to buy a gallon of milk. Sunny may need his hay, but come morning his family will need breakfast.
"Of all things, a man has to come home with his milk," he says.
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