Another way to make our views known: OpenCongress.org's page on America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.
You can sign up and vote, and you should, because right now the score is 24 Yes votes versus 159 No votes.
And you can add a comment. I provide some food for thought over the jump.
Let's make the force of our masses known!
As comment fodder, let me repost what I wrote yesterday:
It's from the book I am currently reading, "Predator Nation" by James K. Galbraith, subtitled "How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too"
It is a fascinating view from an economic scholar on how corporations use government to prey on the masses. His famous father suggested he write it from his deathbed:
On Wednesday, April 26, 2006, I visited my father in his room at Cambridge's Mount Auburn Hospital for what would prove to be the last time. I told him a little bit of what I'd been working on, and he said, "You should write a short book on corporate predation. It will make you the leading economic voice of your generation." Then he paused and added, with his usual modesty, "If I could do it, I would put you in the shade."
He has some great insights into the current fight over health care reform in this book (among many other subjects covered):
The struggle is epic precisely because it is zero sum. Here we see the immense power of the legitimating myth: by discussing it as though the issue had something to do with the efficiency of markets or the freedom of consumer choice, the defense of a functionless pool of profits can be made to seem a legitimate political position.
Another money quote:
Insurance in general is therefore intrinsically a service that the public sector can competently provide at a lower cost than the private sector, and from the standpoint of an entire population, selective private provision of health insurance is invariably inferior to universal public provision. Private health insurance companies would not exist except for their political capacity to forestall creation of universal public systems, backed by their almost unlimited capacity to sow confusion among the general public over the basic economic facts. Liberals who support anything less than a common, public insurance pool have no argument. They are simply tugging their forelocks and bending their knee before this particular bastion of private power.
This last is a point we need to bring up over and over again right now.
Cogent point #1: universal public provision of health insurance covering care is intrinsically better simply due to the large numbers involved. Wider risk pools spread costs more.
And that will enable HR3200 to greatly expand coverage at a lower cost that possible with for-profit insurance.
Which is just what is scaring the insurance industry. And their friends, like the seven members of the Blue Dog Coalition on the House Energy and Commerce panel, who are publicly stating they won't vote for it.
Let's send them a message! Vote here now!