wlbaum's blog

Dear Mr. President,
Like millions of other Americans, I joined your campaign for change and hope during the 2008 election because I saw in you the leadership potential of a great president. Not since John Kennedy took the world stage have I felt so exuberant and joyful for the inauguration of a new president. I knew then as I do now that your fledgling presidency would face monumental challenges, but I believed you had the courage to face them head on and not seek the time-honored tradition of borrowing time and money from future generations to defer the hard choices needed to be made today.

I was pleased in the way you aggressively tried to deal with our economic crisis and how you correctly linked our health care crisis with the economic one. You have said over and over, we can't fix the economy without fixing health care. Not only did you know that health care in this country was costing us 18% of GDP, but our competitors in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world are doing it for half of that and taking care of everyone, while we have over 50 million people without any health security. You also know that for all of our vaunted technology and the money we spend, we rank 37th in the world in health outcomes. So you may imagine my disappointment several months ago when you responded to the question of health care reform by saying, “If we were starting from scratch, single payer would be the way to go,” and then proceeded to dismiss the possibility of achieving it any time soon. Yet I continued to hope because you remained staunchly in favor of a robust national Public Option - A government administered insurance program that would compete with for-profit insurers and whose success, in time, would bring us to a universal, national single payer health care system.

This August of our National Discontent has enabled the right to derail the health care debate, but it also has given our Democratic legislators a windfall - Not having to answer uncomfortable questions about real health care reform.  Questions like, why isn't Medicare for All being considered despite huge public support? Why won't you talk with representatives from countries such as Taiwan and Switzerland who made the switch to national health care in the past 15 years to find out how they did it? If reduced cost, better outcomes, and universal coverage are the goals, why won't you allow your proposals to be examined against the countless  studies done around the world that have examined the benefits (and short-comings) of national health care?

These are the kind of questions I would have liked to put to my elected representatives when they came back to Oregon. Instead, I find myself in the position of being a political lineman, defending the quarterback from being sacked, and all the while not at all in agreement with the play he called. It angers and frustrates me. It also makes me wonder if the Democrats aren't quietly chortling over this "opportunity" the crazy right has given them - the opportunity not to have to defend their choices.

 It's evident in following the mainstream media that a backlash to the boorish town hall behavior is taking hold. Editorials are lashing out at the perpetrators, letters to the editor and columnists (Rich Lowry excepted) universally condemn the disruptions. Meanwhile, the conversation has moved away from specifics and devolved to: Health care reform - Are you for it or against it? Yes, or no? It's like a segment from the McLaughlin Report.

It's been said by Senator Wyden and others that Congress has the best healthcare available. So we have to ask the good senator and most of the other members of Congress: 'Shouldn't you get yourselves some quality hearing aids with that great insurance of yours?' There's no other (polite) way to explain their universal deafness to the public out cry for a national single payer health system, or at the least a robust national public option that could lead us to single payer.

A review of national and regional polls for more than a year have shown public support to be between 59-73% for a national single payer system. In New Hampshire, 65% of all physicians and 81% of primary care physicians supported single payer. In Minnesota, 64% of physicians were in favor of single payer. No national poll in recent months has been less than 59% in favor of a national, universal, single payer health care system. An election victory with numbers like these would be called a landslide, a pubic mandate. So what gives? How can Senator Max Baucus, (D), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and by the way, a committee on which Senator Wyden sits – say single payer is “off the table”?