J.J. Bartlett, Fighting for Fishing Families

 

107. J.J. Bartlett

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, J.J. Bartlett.

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with our classmate. JJ, Bartlett. JJ, welcome to the show.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  00:17

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

 

Will Bachman  00:19

JJ, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  00:24

Well, I guess it’s it’s been a long journey by now. I guess everyone’s starting by saying that it’s hard to imagine. It’s been over 30 years, isn’t it? Yes. So you know my I’ll start with my family, because my wife and I met while we’re in college. She went to Tufts, but she came over, and we met at a Harvard party, and I she hasn’t been able to get rid of me since. So she was a clinician out of school, and then kind of kept going to school and became a researcher, and more specifically, early childhood and infancy mental health researcher. And so that shaped my career in a couple of ways. One is I had in house therapy for my whole life, which was really helpful. I recommend that to anyone, and it’s also much easier raising children with an expert in child development, and also a lot of a lot of sort of systems theory in healthcare came from the dealing with children and families and having them all work together. And so I started a company that I’ll talk more about later, probably, and she was just invaluable in as a resource for me to steal ideas from. And we had two wonderful kids, Molly and Jake, who are 26 and 24 who lived out in Acton for their whole grown up and just moved back to newton.

 

Will Bachman  02:04

So tell me and then kind of what happened? Give me the give me the chronology. Walk me through. You guys graduated, married right after college or yes, yeah,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  02:16

pretty much we we graduated, I think we were engaged in 93 married in 94 had our daughter in 97 and and that’s when I that’s when I went back to graduate school. So about 95 to 97 I was at BU getting an MBA with a concentration in healthcare management, and I was interested, at the time in getting people healthcare coverage. It seemed that it was the most pressing need in healthcare back then. It’s hard to remember, but the President Clinton and Hillary Clinton Health Plan had just failed in 94 and so people were looking for new ways to extend coverage to folks, and that was, that was my primary reason for going to graduate school at the time.

 

Will Bachman  03:20

Okay, so you go to graduate school, you graduate, I guess, in about 97 and then walk us through your career.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  03:28

Well, it’s that’s when it starts getting kind of off the tracks, a little bit interesting, to the extent that that I’ve been anything interesting to say, I think I got word of a group of fishermen who were trying to get health care coverage. And I grew up down in Connecticut, on the on the shore. They used to have a bigger fishery down there, but I was, I was familiar with fishermen. I also in the first person in my family that didn’t grow up on a farm. My dad was a dentist, but he grew up on a farm, and every generation before him were farmers. So I’m sort of familiar with the different lifestyle, the unique lifestyles of harvesters, and I knew that basically, if you can cover fishermen, you can cover anyone with care insurance, it’s such a dangerous job, and so I got involved. I joined a working group, and because it was fishing and Massachusetts and healthcare, the most prominent politicians of the day immediately got involved and were supportive. So I was able to start working with Senator Kennedy, Representative Frank and and another interesting Harvard Connection was that is related to the fact that fishermen, you know, compete very, very heavily. Um. Um, not only to see you could bring the market, bring the product to market first, like farmers, but also they compete for the farm. You know, if you put a lobster pie out in the ocean, you can’t drag through that same area. So because of this, they had feuds that would go back, you know, to Sicily and Portugal, and it was very difficult to get everyone around the table. And there’s at the same time, had been a long standing relationship between the Catholic Church and fishermen here in Massachusetts, with Sicilian fishermen on the North Shore, Irish down in Boston, Portuguese on the south coast. And this has been true, you know, in Europe back for, you know, forever. So, so the the fishing advocates went to cargo law back at the time, another Harvard graduate. And the the combination of the church and the politicians and hospitals joined together, and we were able to start a working group. And in 1997 we launched a health plan for fishermen that was a demonstration project that preceded the statewide reform. So we were able to get the fishermen together in to get a non to get a community rating for the first time, because they’re all independent workers. And then we were able to use state, federal and independent funding to reduce the rates that they pay, and we build them individually. So this is, these are all things that were not going on at the time for people who didn’t get their insurance through their employer groups. And it showed that people would come up and pay rates. And it was, it was really successful. We spent about 15 years covering fishermen. We always did 100% of our enrollment and outreach through local offices that were staffed by members of the fishing community. And that’s really, that was really, really successful and really, really only because, when, you know, I knew from being a kid and also showing up at the docks that no one was going to listen to, you know, a 25 year old health policy nerd on the docks about anything. But, you know, the fishing families, they’re the ones who really have the interest in their folks coming home safe and and at the end of the day and so, so that worked tremendously well. We reduced the rate of uninsured fishermen by about 75% and as the statewide and national reform came on, we knew we had to transition our model, but that was a really exciting period of time.

 

Will Bachman  07:59

Okay, so I have some questions about this. Sure walk us through the status quo before you started this. So there’s individual fishermen. They work on boats, but I guess those boats engage them as independent contractors, I suppose, or that’s exactly right. Okay, so each individual Fisher men, and I guess they’re mostly men, might be some women. So I should,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  08:31

I should have started by saying this, so there are more and more non cis male people getting into the fishing industry all the time. They prefer still to be called fishermen, and so until that changes, I use the term fisherman, all right.

 

Will Bachman  08:46

So we’re saying fishermen. And so there’s captains who own their boat, or have it, you know, maybe part of someone owns the boat. There’s a captain of the boat, and then there’s workers on the boat, but each of those workers is gaged as a 1099, contractor,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  09:02

that’s absolutely right. All right.

 

Will Bachman  09:03

So each of these people, you know, in the 90s, what was the situation if they wanted to get health insurance, either for themselves or for themselves, plus their families? What were options were available? If any,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  09:16

um, you know, half of the fishermen were uninsured, and the other half had either coverage through their spouse, Medicare, Medicaid, or they just had junk coverage. So

 

Will Bachman  09:33

now Medicare, I thought that was like, if you’re 65 or older or something, is that because they were 65 Yeah. So

 

J.J. Bartlett.  09:40

there are fishermen who, you know, who were few and older, yeah, exactly. And they were on Medicare, not many. And then there, there were Medicaid, is if they had lower income, right? And then some spouses had coverage, yeah. Okay, so that accounted for about 25% about 50% were on. Insured, and another 25% the remaining 25% back in the day, they would just sell coverage and say, sometimes they do this outside of the state, but they’ll just sell coverage and say, How much can you afford? And we’ll give you that amount of coverage. And it just once you go to the hospital, it just doesn’t cover anything. So it was just the state of health care was awful. So

 

Will Bachman  10:23

if you were an independent professional in the 90s, a fisherman or any kind of independent and this was in Massachusetts, there was, there was like, No, it sounds like, were there any options available, maybe expensive options, or what, what could people do at that point if they wanted to get health insurance, if they were willing to pay whatever for it, what could they get? Yeah,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  10:44

so in, I mean, it would be the same for, I think a lot of the people you work with, right? I mean, independent consultants would have to find a I mean, I’m speaking very generally, but there were workarounds. Independent consultants would have to find an association to join, okay, unions, you know, could be helpful, but, but for the most part, you know you still, you still see the legacy of those times today, with those growth those groups, and it’s not just fishermen, it’s independent workers, yeah, are still among the workers in this country, even with the Affordable Care Act, who, who are the the highest, who have the highest rate of uninsurance? Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  11:30

So then you create, tell us a little bit more about this, this community plan that you created so someone probably needed to prove that they were actually actively a fisherman so many days per year, something to qualify and and then, how did it work? They they would qualify for it, and then they would be, would they get to have their families on it as well? Tell us a bit about the plan.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  11:59

Yeah, yeah. It was, it was fun developing all this because there were no real there’s no real history to go by so and it’s actually and I can answer the other question about the history of the industry as a because we transitioned to a new program that even talks about that, more about how difficult the industry is, but just real quick on, Oh, do you know what? I lost the thread. Could you repeat the question?

 

Will Bachman  12:32

Oh, yeah, sure. So tell us about, like, the actual, you know, the structure of this plan, like, how did it work? And it sounds like there was a federal government involved, maybe the state, like the hospitals were involved. Tell us about the players and about the structure. This seems to me like some topic for a PhD, for some, you know, budding kind of history healthcare, you know, kind of person. I mean, it sounds fascinating that one of the first health plans, community health plans for independent professionals. And, you know, I can imagine the PhD on the impact on the Massachusetts, you know, coverage, plan and stuff. So walk us, give us a little bit more detail on

 

J.J. Bartlett.  13:11

1. Yeah, absolutely, it was really, it was really awesome. And one of the reasons was that it came everything we do came from the community, you know. And you know, again, because my wife, I wanted to stick with that, you know, she said, there’s a lot of people come in with their degrees and tell people who are in need what they need. And you know, if you go to the people and ask them what they need, you just get much better results. So this was a group of fishermen who started. They asked the politicians and everyone who came along to come along with them, the Paul, you know, the people in power did. And so we saw the, you know, we really saw the best of the church, the best of the politicians, best of state politicians, federal politicians. The theory was, and in Massachusetts, the best of healthcare, like these are all the people right, who later went on to really developed the statewide reform. So so they it was just an awesome group to work with in any case. So the first thing that we did, like I said, was group them together. And you’re right, you nailed it. We had to figure out who’s a fisherman. And so, you know, we basically came up with rules if you’re primarily and directly related to the fishing industry. And that means that you know, more than half of your income has to come from fishing, because there are, there were some places. And it means that your income if you moved to another place wouldn’t exist, so if you moved to the middle of the country. Because what was happening is we were getting fishermen, but we would also get people who had, you know, food stands, and they would say, like, we serve breakfast only to fishermen. Do. We count, and it’s like, well, no food stands exist in Idaho and but, but like a diesel mechanic who just works on fishing boats, they may apply other than that, it was just, you know, income from from commercial fishing, making sure there’s no whaling or anything crazy going on. And people can apply it. And then after that, it was we tried to make it look like any other health plan they would, they would get a card we, we partnered for a bunch of years with for about the first half of the plan, with Tufts health plan, so they would just get a tufts health plan card for the second half the health plan, we partnered with Harvard Pilgrim and the fishermen would just get a Harvard Pilgrim card. And what was key for the funding? Well, there were two things that were key. One is setting up the infrastructure just to be able to build everyone directly. The other was that the average employer, the average person in this country, gets their insurance through an employer group, and that employer group usually pays at the time they were paying 80% of the costs on average. And independent workers, again, get none of that. So, um, we took the federal money, and we weren’t able to get it, and state money, by the way, the federal money kicked in early, and then it was really a state program, and we were able to reduce the rate that the fishermen paid on average, not to not not by 80% like, I mean, not to 20% which is what the people who work in employer groups usually pay, but the fishermen paid 60% of the rate, which was both good for taxpayers, because it was, you know, the fishermen were picking up the rest, and it was good for the fishermen because they could afford it. We did it on a sliding scale that we redid every year, and that was because another thing that is very difficult for the industry. These industries, they have fluctuating incomes. So one year they might be doing great, get no subsidy. The next year, their engine might blow and they get more subsidy. And in doing that, it smooths out a period for fishermen where they can afford coverage over a period of time, as opposed to kind of going on and off coverage, like what was happening before they get money, they join something expensive, or if they lost a lot, they go on mass health. But you know one, I know I’m long winded here, but one funny related story is that, you know, recently, they caught a world record tuna. It was $3 million this one tuna sushi grade, you know, and that’s unusual, but they do but tunas do sell for 20,000 50,000 100,000 that’s not unusual for a big bluefin tuna, and so literally, you’re on mass health. You go out to sea, and we’ve had this happen, you catch three fish, and you’re no longer eligible for mass health anymore, because you’ve made too much money now, and you don’t, you know, you don’t get the you don’t get into fishing because you love filling out paperwork and checking the mail every day. So those are usually people who you know go to the doctor and find out that they dropped off the rolls.

 

Will Bachman  18:30

Wow, so, but that wasn’t the case with your with your plan, exactly.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  18:36

So our plan covered that by having a sliding scale like the connector does now, and we could test out the sliding scale. And so if people had more, they would pay more that year, and then if they, if they didn’t, they would get more subsidy. And so it’s called churn. It would just reduce the churn in healthcare.

 

Will Bachman  18:55

What was the role of the Catholic Church in helping set this up?

 

J.J. Bartlett.  18:59

So, so the Fishing Partnership Health Plan healthcare system has been in the news a lot lately, and prior to Stuart actually bought the healthcare system from a Catholic healthcare system named characters Christie. And so the it’s the same network that they’re talking about now, it’s just in the mid 90s, cared as Christie was a Catholic healthcare network. And so the fishermen took the idea to Cardinal law. Cardinal law took the idea over to carodis Christie, and said, Is there anything you can do? And another Harvard graduate, rich Dougherty, saw the opportunity in this to help historically underserved population, and really, really supported it. And so carries Christy put together and formed the first working group that I was talking about, and were really the first ones to bring a. Uh, Senator Kennedy and Carrie and the Frank and the delegation to the table,

 

Will Bachman  20:07

and the actual entity that you set up? Was it like a nonprofit, a for profit company? Did it contract with Tufts? So, like, talk to me about just the entity aspect of it.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  20:20

And, yeah, absolutely so we were, we were a unique demonstration project, so we didn’t fit any category, any specific category. We weren’t a we weren’t a union because fishermen can’t really unionize, because workers can rise through the ranks to become managers. So or, you know, on a boat of four, you can have, you know, two captains, and they’re, you know, and their managers, and then they go on another boat, and they’re not anymore. So it’s, it’s hard to, very, very difficult to unionize workers in the fishing industry. And then on top of that, most of the unions have been bust, have been busted up over the years. So, so,

 

Will Bachman  21:09

so, like the structure, the entity of this was it, was it a company of for profit.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  21:13

It was just a nonprofit. It was a nonprofit company, and it looked like, and we were, yeah, we had a, we just use tufts as a third party administrator. So we would set the prices, give them, you know, tell them who was eligible for the plan, how much they were paying. We’d send them checks for the difference. And so, you know, we kind of made all the decisions, and then they tufts. And then later, Harvard, it did the did the actual payments and negotiations with the doctors and payments of the for the hospitalizations and like, wow,

 

Will Bachman  21:51

what sort of either lessons from this, or people who are involved in this talk to me about how they then went on to influence the Massachusetts State Health Plan, which then, in some ways, became the model for Obamacare. It’s amazing, Kenny, you were sort of two generations, influencing the Affordable Care Act. In some ways, talk to us about either some of the people who were involved in your plan that then went on to work on the Massachusetts State Plan,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  22:22

sure. I mean, there were, there were tons and tons. And I want to be clear. I mean, because the people are so amazing, yeah, it all would have happened in some way or another. Yeah, it was awesome to be there at the beginning of it really exciting, and stick to it. But the easiest example is one of, you know, we had a small nonprofit board and the Kevin kunahan, who was from tofts, who was serving on our board, is the person who was high he went to the Massachusetts connector as the head of marketing. And and then when the first year of Obamacare and the computers weren’t quite working well, he went down to fix it. So he was the person in the second year that fixed all fixed the log logging in and all the difficulties that people were having. Oh, wow. So yeah. And there’s, you know, a ton more, just especially in the the sort of Kennedy healthcare world and, and actually, can, can I bridge to where we are now? Let’s go similarly cool. So there’s, there’s a great fishing story, not happy, but interesting that happened at the at the end of when we were health plan. So we knew that we were we knew that statewide reform was coming. We knew that national reform was even coming at this point in about 2010 2011 it you know, the national reform had passed. And if, and we knew that sort of we had put ourselves out of business, you know, a lot of nonprofits, we tried to do that. And we actually had, you know, there, if this existed, if Obamacare and statewide reform existed in the mid 90s, we would have just helped people sign up for coverage, you know, and, and so that’s one huge lesson that we learned the the, you know, it’s much better not to carve out the most dangerous population in the country, but we knew there was too much great healthcare that was going on in these enrollment offices through these family members of fish of the fishing community. So an example of this is that we had a fisherman in the last winter of our health plan who and I changed some of this just so it’s not identifiable. But you know, true story, the fishermen lost their. Them in a winch, which is pretty common. They fishermen work in conditions we haven’t accepted in shoreside manufacturing plants in over 100 years. And so a lot of regulations are different at sea than they are on land and and so they had to in many of these winches don’t have stop buttons next to him. The way that they stop is you turn off the engine, and it’s directly tied the engine. So as the engine slowly stops, the winch slowly stops. So as this is going on, the gentleman loses his arm. He gets meta backed out to Mass General. And I’m running an insurance plan. So instead of thinking me as a nonprofit, think of me about it as an evil insurance plan. I’m getting, I’m getting, I get a note, and it says that he’s been medevacked out, and that he’s fixed his arm. I don’t think they reattached it, but they were able to stop the bleeding. Oh no, they didn’t, because he went back to work, so a couple weeks. So for me, it’s like, that’s a one time risk. It’s an identifiable risk, you know, and we have insurance against it, you know, that’s, it’s not like, you know, long term chronic disease or hemophilia or something that’s can keep going and be very expensive. So one time thing is very expensive, but we can, we have insurance against it. A couple weeks later, the captain’s wife calls into one of our offices staffed by one of her friends, who’s a Fisherman’s Wife also, and says, and she says, what you know? What’s wrong? What’s wrong with the cap? You know the guy? And she says, nothing’s wrong with the guy. He went to shock. He doesn’t remember a thing. He he’s back fishing. He rigged his he rigged his boat so he can fish with one arm. But the crew that witnessed this that had to clean up, they are not, you know, they’re they’re in shock, two of whom are at home in dark rooms. One of them is starting to drink and the other one’s starting to get violent. Now from a healthcare perspective, that’s where you really see the long term costs. That’s where you see generational cycles of abuse and neglect that you if you can stop early, you can make huge progress. So what we did was we took those enrollment personnel, we staffed them up and called them navigators, and we trained them as community health workers, and the first intensive training we gave them was as to help people sign up for healthcare coverage, and they transitioned all of our members onto the existing Obamacare or whatever other programs were available, and then they we just basically said, What are the needs? And started training up in whatever their their needs were, so we ended up becoming sort of a human resources agency for the fishing industry.

 

Will Bachman  28:12

Wow. And what did you do with the you know, what was the reaction of the health plan to to those folks that had were, you know, were in shock and depression or from witnessing the accident,

 

J.J. Bartlett.  28:27

yeah, well, so unfortunately for, you know, for the for the health plan, you know, we could meet with them and get them into treatment and the like. So that was, that was good, but we also, you know, we are, are that’s where we could stop, you know, in trying to get them insured, but, but now we have, now we had a whole system of care available. So we, we developed safety trainings for fishermen. We we created a national grant program so that not just and we provide safety trainings from Maine down to the Carolinas, but fishermen weren’t eligible, really for for safety training funding in any regular way prior to this, even though it’s the deadliest job in the country. And so you know, training fishermen to be safer at sea is one huge preventive measure. And you know, another one is another is, is to you know, surround in care, the folks who, who were like you said, either injured or witnessed it. We we’ve set up. We now have relationships with trauma centers and. And so we can send people, whether it’s a financial disaster or safety disaster, folks can go to Riverside trauma center and get treated by the same therapists who treated the Boston first responders after the marathon bombing, for example, and so the, you know, there’s now trauma care, all sorts of things that other, like I said, people who work for employers kind of get within their HR department.

 

Will Bachman  30:37

So after, like you had been running this for about 15 years, and Obamacare came along and so forth, and people were able to transition to that. Tell me, you know, continue on your career trajectory. Have you sort of transitioned that nonprofit, or did you leave and start something new to keep going with your story?

 

J.J. Bartlett.  30:56

Yeah, so we kept So thankfully, when we signed up, our nonprofit had a general mission, which was to improve the health safety and economic security of commercial fishermen, their families and their communities. So given that we had that general mission, we were able to keep our nonprofit going and switch directions. And so we had also learned a ton. You know, we learned how critical fishermen are to our economy. You know, as an economic engine, more seafood in value has landed in Massachusetts than any other state besides Alaska. New Bedford’s the largest port in the country. It’s a, we’re a multi billion dollar industry. It’s $15 billion of sales per year in Massachusetts. And if you know, between seafood, commercial fishing, aquaculture, we employ 130,000 people who depend on the 7000 harvesters. So there are 7000 fishermen, but once you truck the fish and cut the fish and process it, there are 130,000 people in the seafood industry. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is saying that fishing must add 1000s of new jobs, not only to keep up with demand, but to keep up with you know, you kind of notice that when I mentioned their Fisher fishermen who are over 65 it’s an aging population, and so to keep up with the people who are Leaving, we need growth. In addition, we saw during covid How important food security is, and fishermen feed 220, 7 million pounds 220, 7 million pounds a year, which they can feed all of Boston for a year with that amount of fish, and it’s not just lobster and scallops, but less glamorous fish like Whiting and mackerel that are staple proteins in lower lower income communities. And so those are all the reasons that we learned that fishermen sort of needed our help, but as far as I mean, why we need a fisherman? But we realized, sadly, fishermen really need our help too. And we talked about this before, but most of them are independent workers, and they’ve been left behind by the 21st century health care. And it’s not just fishermen. If you look at workers who have three trades, they have, uh, high rates of pain and injury on the job, no paid leave, so they don’t get sick days or vacation days, because they’re independent workers and they don’t have job security. Um, so if you’re a if you’re a fisherman, and you’re called by your captain, and the captain says, I need you to come out today, and you say anything else, but yes, cap, not only will you not get paid that day, if you stay home for you know, your daughter’s graduation, you may get a reputation as someone who doesn’t work and not get asked to fish ever again. So when you add those three traits together, you’re talking about fishermen, farmers, loggers, construction workers. If you’re talking about occupations that have more female workers, you’re talking about home health aides and food service workers. We call them workers without a net, a group, any group of workers who have high rates of pain and injury on the job and they can’t take leave and they can’t say no to their boss, those groups are at the top of every bad CDC list you can imagine. And getting back to fishermen, even the best of times they have fluctuating incomes, their livelihoods depend on forces that. Are entirely outside of their control, like weather, you know, the price of fish regulations, it’s wicked stressful. Add to that that it’s the deadly, most dangerous job in the country. Half of fishermen have either been hurt on the job or witnessed the traumatic event, like death, fire, flooding on the job. So you just start compounding stress around stress or trauma on the trauma. And like I said, these are far from the best of times there. There’s a graying of the fleet. There are regulations coming in global warming. So Massachusetts fishermen are among the workers in this country who are lowest paid, most likely to die on the job, 40 times more likely to die on the job than your average worker, most likely to go without health insurance, most likely to die of an opioid overdose and most likely to die by suicide. And this is the trick. They also get far less support than other workers, because the average worker at a large employer group has a human resources department that is spending $1,500 per worker per year just to make sure that you know, they’re getting the training they need to do their job and to do it safely. Um, if they need tetanus shots, they get technicians and these groups of of workers without net just don’t have the same access to those supports. And so that’s why we group together these navigators and opened offices and up in Gloucester, Plymouth, New Bedford and out in the cape, and they’re able to provide those services that are otherwise not available to these workers without a net. Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  36:50

So talk to us about the range of services that the organization provides, and I’m not sure if we got the name of it. What’s the what’s the name of the organization? We

 

J.J. Bartlett.  36:59

are fishing partnership support services. The original company was fishing partnership health plan, and now we changed our name to fishing partnership support services, and I’m the founding president. As I said, we’ve been in operation since 97 The first thing we do is we put people from the industry out into the field, and they’re trained as community health workers. We then, like I said, our most you know, we always started with this that you can make a huge, huge jump in health if you can get people from being uninsured to insured. So every year. And then also with fishermen, as I said, they had fluctuating incomes. So people come on and off insurance each year. And so we sign up 1000s of families for healthcare coverage every year. And then, in addition, we run a community health program where we try to get as much preventive care out to folks as possible. So we will have dental groups go right to the docks, and we’ll get a, you know, a room off in the corner, and they’ll do dental cleanings all day. And we sometimes will coordinate with a vessel when they’re coming back in. You know, do these preventive measures and getting them out, getting them back out to sea. Another example is covid. For example, covid shots we had, we had a clinic. And you can imagine, it was tough to get, it was a very difficult time to get anyone to get covid shots. And fishermen aren’t necessarily the first to stand in line to support things that come directions that come from outside the fishing industry. But working through the fishing industry, we had one, you know, one of our one of our vaccination events. We had over 800 fishermen get covid vaccinations up in Gloucester, and that was 100% because the fishermen’s wives were talking to each other and bringing their families in. Then we really have begun behavioral health services. As I said, fishermen are more likely than any other worker to die from an opioid overdose in Massachusetts. And the reason is just what I stated, you can imagine, you you have a tremendous amount of pain on your job. We have a friend who was saying that he was experiencing the worst pain he’s ever had. And you can’t imagine how tough this guy is. And he has to work. He has to continue working. If he doesn’t, and tells the boat, we all go got we all have to go back. Since they all get paid a percentage of the catch, they would all lose money. In addition, they all owe a percentage of the expenses when they go out. So when they go out, they owe a percentage of the ice, they owe a percentage of the bait. So if he says, Oh, my back is hurting, and they say, great. So all seven people on the vessel have to go back and explain why they’re not only busted, but they’re in debt. So that rarely happens unless it’s very, very serious. What? What did happen was one of his partners, and this, you know, instead of in an office, someone will throw you an aspirin for your migraine. They said, Hey, I got a couple per cassette. Great. They worked they worked again. They worked again. After 40 days, he comes ashore, gets a prescription because of Of course, he should be on, I mean, this he’s he needs pain meds. He can’t get through the day. But then the the prescription runs out. They don’t want to give them a new one. There are dealers everywhere, on the docks. They know about this. And if it’s not the docks, it’s the diners, it’s the, you know, wherever. And they start selling, you know, I can sell you Percocets and then, but they’re very expensive. And, you know, it’s the same medicine as heroin. That’s a lot cheaper, and that’s how you go from being fine to being having a substance use disorder, and absolutely due to your workplace. So knowing this, we were able to go out and our navigators, you know, brought this to us. The fishermen didn’t even want to talk about, you know, the fishermen feel like the stigma that comes with all the movies and books and TV shows that paints fishermen as drug users and substance users and and they feel like we don’t. That’s not who we are. You know, even, even if there are higher rates of fishermen than other folks who suffer from substance use disorder, it’s still a small percentage of the population. And so there’s a lot of captains are walking around saying, I don’t want to even hear about this. I don’t want to do anything about it. So our navigators were able to, again, being from the community, first of all, explain what I explained. This is a problem of the job, not of your people, and then secondarily, you are all out to see if someone is flooding. What would you do? And they said we would go over to them. And you know, these, if someone, you know, they both died, they needed a tunnel in. If someone needed was having a asthma attack, I throw them an inhaler for my first aid kit. What were you doing? What would you do if they were overdosing? Well, I would need, I don’t have Narcan. I would need Narcan, right? You know, so we, our navigator, began the process. We were working with the City of New Bedford and got a SAMHSA grant to work with fishermen as non traditional first responders, because at sea, they are the most likely to come upon another recreational vessel or another fishing vessel for any reason, but certainly in the case of of overdoses, and that broke everything free. And now we’re just we’re training 1000s of fishermen a year in carrying Narcan and the use of Narcan. We have navigators trained up as recovery coaches, and as I said before, we have partnerships with groups all along the treatment spectrum, including the trauma support that we have.

 

Will Bachman  43:33

What important work? Wow, where does your funding come from? We’ll

 

J.J. Bartlett.  43:39

take it from anywhere. It’s mostly still from the state. Well, it’s about half from the state and half from the federal government now, and we’re starting to try to build our fundraising. All right,

 

Will Bachman  43:51

I want to shift gears. I want to go back to college and ask you, were there any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

J.J. Bartlett.  44:02

You know, what’s interesting I was thinking about this. I think for me, there were two things that were incredibly important that I think about more than the classes. I didn’t kind of go the traditional route. I mean, I ended up in a job that has nothing to do with what I studied. So but the the, I think, the people and the sort of culture, slash history slash aura, so along the people side, it’s things like, you know, every, every governor since 97 has really supported our plan, which means I have the great benefit of being able to work with my friend from Kirkland House, Governor Maura Healey, on this program. She’s been incredible in supporting workers and in going after and uh. And receiving opioid funding as the Ag, and now as governor, you know, she’s doubled down on her support of independent workers and the like. So you know people like her that you know, just to be able to know her from so long ago, know what a wonderful person she is at the core, and then to get to work with her all these years later is just fantastic. Similarly, you know, the the Mayor of New Bedford is was a year ahead of us. And you know, the and then the aura piece, there’s something about being involved in the fishing industry that relates to the history of Boston in a similar way that fishing relates to the history and Harvard relates to the history of Boston. There’s, there’s a way that it’s hard to explain, but it’s all kind of tied together. You know, when you’re at Harvard and steeped in the his, in the history, it feels like it’s important. It, you know, feels like it’s, I can see why people go into politics. You know, it feels like it’s a calling to some, I think, and so that, you know, seeing that graduating, and then seeing and being immediately able to work with Senator Kennedy, and, you know, all those other folks and most of his staff, you know, and all that. And just see that thread it was. It was very comfortable and also consistent with, I guess, my time at Harvard,

 

Will Bachman  46:38

JJ, for people that want to learn more about the fishing partnership. Where would you point them online? What’s the

 

J.J. Bartlett.  46:45

website? Fishingpartnership.org?

 

Will Bachman  46:49

Fantastic. JJ, thank you so much for being on the show and for the wonderful work that you’re doing for this population in Massachusetts that needs the help. Was great speaking with you. You

 

J.J. Bartlett.  47:00

too. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. Bye.