Dear President Obama,
I could hardly be more confident, nor more delighted, that the country is in your hands. I thank you for the hard work you and your team are doing in so many areas of national need.
Like any other politically engaged citizen, I have my wishlist of the problems I'd like for you to tackle, and I'm amazed by how many checks I'm penciling in on that list. However, none of the items on my wishlist are based in any philosophy or doctrine, as I don't really know much about such things. Each item on my wishlist is based on this average citizen's plain observation, over many years, of what it seems to the country needs.
And the number one item on my wishlist, universal health care, got a strangely unconvincing answer from you in your digital town hall meeting on 3/26/09. I don't have a transcript in front of me, but it seems to me I heard you say that we couldn't have single-payer because, at least in part, some people aren't used to that, that they're used to getting insurance through their employer or in some other way.
Well, Mr. President, we're used to a lot of things that don't work, and for more and more Americans getting health insurance from their employer is becoming one of these things. Too many people are sweating about when their employer is going to say that they can't give them health insurance anymore. Too many people have seen their coverage shrink to a mere token of real coverage, or are now faced with deductibles that make them wonder if they are insured in the first place. Too many Americans don't have any health insurance at all, or can't even get it if they could afford it.
Your answers, whether they are the ones I want to hear or not, are usually focused and clear as a bell. Your answer on single-payer was not.
Mr. President, I realized that you never promised a single-payer solution during the campaign, but that doesn't take it off the top of my wish list.
You talk about saving on health care costs by instituting electronic medical records. Sounds great. Wouldn't we save far, far more on health care costs by thanking the insurance companies for their years of being the middle man standing between Americans and their healthcare, and cutting them out of the process? Getting rid of these useless middle men seems to me like a way to save billions and billions of dollars in healthcare costs. The healthcare solutions that somehow include the insurance companies all need to twist themselves into unnatural and highly expensive Rube Goldberg-like formations.
President Obama, I would have preferred that you say that we can't have single-payer because the insurance companies would never allow it, or that you're trying to concentrate on fixing the economy and delivering what you actually promised during the campaign, but I do not for one second believe that Americans won't accept single-payer insurance because they're used to getting their insurance in some other way.
I doubt I am the only devoted Obama supporter who felt that your answer today was strange and unsatisfactory.
I doubt that I'm the only one who thinks that what's broken in our very broken system will not really have been fixed if the Federal Government doesn't provide direct health insurance to all Americans.
As your initiatives constantly illuminate, the silver lining to the terrifying situation we find ourselves in is that the big changes that are ordinarily impossible to implement now have some hope of coming about. I don't need a straighter answer than the one you gave today, I'm just hoping that in the months ahead you see that we need to get a health insurance and healthcare system that is on par with those in Europe and Canada. We're willing to pay for a better system, but right now we're paying much more for much less.
Employees are terrified for their health insurance. Employers are wondering if they can keep operating and supply health insurance for their people.
Mr. President, even physicians are starting to see fewer patients because people can't afford their co-payments, deductibles or uninsured visits. They're going to have to get used to making less money either because that's what they'll get in a single-payer solution, or that's what they'll get because the government's solution is something less than single-payer and people won't be showing up at their offices for needed healthcare.
I think about it this way. If we get single-payer, people will 'get used to it' very, very quickly. They won't rise up in fury because their deductible went down or disappeared.
On the other hand, if we were living in a single-payer environment, and some future president said we were going to go back to a system of employer-supplied health insurance, THAT'S when you would see people rise up to protest changing what they will have become used to.
The time has come for this change. Please consider making it.