Well, I sent a letter to President Obama the other day. I've never done such a thing before, so I thought I would share it with y'all.
Dear Mr. President,
I watched your press conference on Wednesday evening with great interest, and just thought it would be a good time for me to make a few observations on the healthcare debate that is currently going on in Washington. There’s a lot of worry about how to make it affordable, and one metaphor you used in comparing what we have now to what some of our allies have, was to talk about how, if my neighbor bought a car and I bought a similar car, and then found out my neighbor’s car cost $6,000.00 less, I’d want to know how I could get that deal.
That analogy got me thinking about the cars that I’ve owned, and why and how I came to own them; and from there I started thinking about my Dad, and the cars we had when I was growing up in the late 50’s and early 60’s. My dad always used to say that his mother, my Grandma, always knew the precise moment to get rid of her car and buy a new one, so that it was just before every major system in the car needed to be repaired or replaced. He knew this from personal experience, because as a young man with a growing family he generally got her old car whenever she bought a new car, and those expensive repairs ended up being his headache.
I remember those old cars: there was the car with the hole in the floor of the back seat, which we liked to drop pebbles through as we drove; there was another that didn’t make left turns, so that we had to plan all of our shopping trips very carefully so that we could get home again; and there was another car that had no reverse gear, so that my mother had to leave a note on the car windshield politely asking that she not be given a ticket due to this extenuating circumstance.
I had my own "Grandma’s Old Car" experience when my Grandma turned ninety, and my Dad got her a new car and I became the "lucky" recipient of her old one. I was in graduate school at the time, and the only thing lucky about that car was that I lived across the street from a kind and extremely honest auto mechanic, who very quickly became my new best friend. The year was 1987 and the car was a 1976 Cadillac Sedan DeVille that got about 5 miles to a gallon of gasoline and required a major repair approximately every 100 miles. After about ten months, I came to the same realization that my Dad had come to years earlier: a free car is not necessarily a bargain. Even my auto mechanic was thrilled when I bought a new Subaru Justy.
Mr. President, you’re a busy man, so I’ll just cut to the end here: when you became POTUS in January, you became the proud owner of the "Grandma’s Old Car" of healthcare systems. No matter how you try to fix it, it’s still going to be a broken-down, worn out, more dangerous than useful, and more costly to fix than replace system. It will cost us buckets full of money. It will cost you boat-loads of political capital. It won’t get you – or more importantly US - where we need to go in terms of improving the health of our citizens and you’ll end up having to replace it anyway. Or – it will kill your Presidency and you’ll be the guy who didn’t get healthcare for the American people because you and the Congress were just too attached to the old system.
I understand. I loved Grandma’s Old Car, but it was killing me financially and quite frankly, it could have gotten me killed literally if it had broken down in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I did what was necessary. I gritted my teeth, did my homework and braved the car dealerships. I junked the old car and learned to love a new car – one with standard transmission, and only three cylinders, but it allowed me to stop living my life as an indentured servant to my car.
Mr. President, the American people can learn to work with a new system, and we need to stop living our lives as indentured servants to our insurance companies. We need you and the Congress to grit your teeth, do your homework, and get rid of our old, broken-down, worn out, more dangerous than useful, and more costly to fix than replace healthcare system, and introduce something entirely new. The old system with a few cosmetic changes just isn’t going to get us where we need to go as a country. You know it, Congress knows it, and the American people surely know it – it’s why we elected you, because we wanted that Change We Can Believe In. If the Republicans and the Blue Dogs want to moan and cry about the cost of a public option Mr. President, then call their bluff and give us a single payer system like my Canadian friends and cousins have. It works, they love it – actually no, they don’t love it, they take it for granted. It’s something they feel they are entitled to as Canadians. And everyone is covered for what you already know is a very reasonable and affordable cost. Once people experience health CARE as opposed to health INSURANCE, the debate will be over and the people who made healthcare for all a reality for the American people will be national heroes.
You can do it Mr. President. Yes You Can.
Respectfully,
lcork
Not the kind of hard-hitting policy-filled letter that someone else might have sent, but I've always been sort of a "master of the obvious", after first trying everything else and failing. There's an old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", so surely the opposite is true. Oh wait, that would be, "stop throwing good money after bad". It seems that plain ordinary logic like this would not be so hard to come by in the halls of Congress or the White House, but that's wishful thinking, apparently.
For some great ways to take action, I refer you to slinkerwink's excellent diary series. Here is today's offering: Congressional-Progressives-Threaten-To-Block-Health-Reform! Hop along over there now and make some calls. Your health, and the health of future generations depends on what we do today.