On Saturday kid oakland posted a terrific diary on Daily Kos. In it he asked all of us who donated, volunteered or worked on the Obama campaign, to e-mail President Obama at this key moment in the campaign for healthcare reform, in a very specific way. How? By sending e-mails of your story and your message to info@barackobama.com. I'll let mindoca explain:
If you donated to Barack Obama or volunteered to work on his campaign, you are assuredly getting frequent e-mails from the President, his advisors and surrogates on a regular basis. You will recognize these e-mails because they come from info@barackobama.com. Each and every one of them. Check your inbox and you will see.
As kid oakland asked yesterday, "Did you know that you can write to Barack Obama using that email address? Further, did you know that when you write to Barack Obama at info@barackobama.com, that Barack Obama's staff at barackobama.com will be able to see right away from your email address that you were a donor or a volunteer for his campaign?"
Well, it's true. And it's powerful. We all know that politicians notice when their donors and volunteers contact them -- especially en masse. It works in much the same way as we have seen with constituent pressure during the the beginning stages of the campaign for real healthcare reform. And we know for certain that they take the emails that they receive at info@barackobama.com very seriously. You can trust that your emails are being read and noted -- even more so in greater numbers.
There are 13,000,000 of us -- yes, that's thirteen million -- on Barack Obama's email list. It would be hard for him not to notice even a fraction of that many millions of voices calling for change at the same time this weekend.
Yesterday, we began a simple, straightforward action that you can easily take to help secure real healthcare reform this year. You can do it from the comfort of your living room, and I hope that you will do it tonight.
The action is called Letters to Obama and here's how it works:
All you have to do is to write a personal letter to the President about health care reform at his info@barackobama.com email address.
As kid oakland said yesterday, "We need to root our principled requests for Obama to pass comprehensive health care reform in stories from our activism and our day to day lives, especially stories that tell the president about the urgent need for reform. The more principled, specific and rooted those stories are, the more they will break through the clutter of the health care debate."
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Here is the letter I wrote in response to this great idea.
Dear President Obama,
My name is (my name), I am 15 years old currently. I supported you running for President since 2006. During the campaign worked actively in your support. I was a precinct captain and then data captain during the primary and general election, I blogged repeatedly in favor of your candidacy by showing your policy positions and the grassroots energy behind your campaign, I started online fundraising drives for you and congressional candidates favoring your platform that raised nearly sixty five thousand dollars.
I talked to my family, my friends and total strangers and advocated passionately on your behalf. I do not expect you to be perfect and never have but I believed and still believe that we need a calm, inclusive leader to meet the many challenges we face.
The challenge that I write to you about today is the healthcare system in America. I agree strongly with the three principles for healthcare reform you outlined and have worked to gather support for them. They are:
- Reduce costs: Rising health care costs are crushing the budgets of governments, businesses, individuals, and families, and they must be brought under control
- Guarantee choice: Every American must have the freedom to choose their plan and doctor – including the choice of a public insurance option
- Ensure quality care for all: All Americans must have quality and affordable health care
We have a historic opportunity to reach those goals and our country and our people cannot afford not to. When you address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday I hope you stand strong in favor of those principles. Despite what you may have seen on the media Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of those principles and their has been a grassroots outpouring in favor of them over the last month. You will have a critical opportunity to reaffirm those principles and argue for them persuasively in front of the Congress and the American people.
I hope you take the opportunity to ask Congress for more specific polices to meet your principles and ask that they include the following 10 polices in it's final healthcare legislation:
-A fully federally funded expansion of Medicaid for millions of low income families
-New regulations so that no one is denied coverage because of pre existing conditions ever again.
-A requirement that health insurers spend a minimum amount of their premium dollars on medical care, preferably 85 percent or more.
-Sliding scale subsides up to 400 percent of FPL so that middle class working families can afford health insurance.
-Cap on out of pocket spending to give Americans real health security.
-Help for small business in addition to the exchange and public option in the form of tax credits to make health insurance affordable.
-Reforming Medicare by cutting waste, fraud and abuse and closing or significantly reducing the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D.
-Modernize the healthcare delivery system by expanding Health IT, improving coordination and putting in place incentives that reward quality care not wasteful tests and building off of models that work such as the Mayo Clinic in my home state of Minnesota.
-Share responsibility with a individual and employer mandate and a surtax on the wealthy to finance reform.
- A exchange modeled off FEHBP that includes the choice of a public option open at a minimum to small businesses, the uninsured and the self-employed.
Many of the those elements are already in the bills that have already passed out of four committees but the American people still need to understand what reform will do and why it will help. I am confident that you can do that and urge you to come out strongly for all of those principles and polices for healthcare reform, including the only policy included in your core principles, a public option.
The stakes of this could not be higher. Our current healthcare system is failing millions of Americans and is not sustainable in the long term. As a passionate supporter and volunteer and citizen of the United States of America I urge you to do your best to deliver on these principles. I pledge to help in whatever capacity I can. As Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Give it a little push on Wednesday.
Yes we can!
Yours,
(my name)
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I tried to get to the heart of what this debate is about with those ten principles. Those are polices that are going to have huge a huge impact on everyone in America. They mean the difference between life and death. Between millions leading a fulfilling, dignified life with high quality care or dying because they couldn't afford health insurance.
As a community we must unite and fight for ALL of those principles and use our voices to urge the President to deliver on his principles.
Hundreds wrote the President and shared in the comments of kid oakland's diary. It's worth reading. Keep sending letters and sharing yours in the comments. It is making a difference.
The stakes are simply too high to stay on the sidelines. This is a simple step you can take to make your voice heard.
Just email info@barackobama.com and we can win this!
Additionally as k/o suggested today you should also tell your story to your representatives in Congress. Obama made it clear once again today that he stands strongly for healthcare reform with a public option and I'm optimistic he will outline many of these principles on Wednesday but many in Congress need to get a push. Send your story to your representative in Congress and your Senators
Here's how I look at it. We have a majority or very close to a majority in the House, the President and roughly 90 percent of the votes needed in the Senate on board already. I see us as being 80-90 percent of the way towards health care reform with a public insurance option. Now that doesn't mean we can't lose in the remaining moments but if it was a marathon we wouldn't be worrying about that, we'd be going into high gear to sprint towards the finish line. We need to do the same thing on healthcare reform.
Yes we can!
On a final note, you can follow this project on TWITTER or post your own using the tags: #dearobama and #hcr.
Important activist info: For alerts on action diaries and other important healthcare news, please sign up for Netroots for Healthcare or follow along on Twitter: @Netroots4HC.
If you read, comment in or tip this diary, please make sure to recommend it, too. And don't forget to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter. Any increased visibility will mean hundreds, if not thousands more letters reaching the President Obama and Congress at this key moment in the drive for real healthcare reform.