Dear Mr. President

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.

Now I see almost every day in the news that your resolve is slipping yet further. That the unconscionable compromises being discussed in Congress are becoming your compromises. The Public Option is morphing into “regional public cooperatives”,or only a “sliver” in the grand scheme of things. Health care reform is becoming “health insurance reform”.

Mr. President, “reforming” private health insurance will not resolve our health care crisis and it will certainly not revive our economy. It will not enable us to encourage the production of more doctors, nurses, and other desperately needed medical professionals, nor will it provide a means to get health services to parts of the country where they are most sorely needed. It will not enable us to identify effective treatments and best practices. In short, it will not guarantee better health for our nation at a cost less than what we are currently paying. Only one proven approach, the one you yourself acknowledged, a National Single Payer Health Care System, can achieve those goals.

Please Mr. President, do not forget the hope you gave us, do not forget the trust we put in you, and do not forget the great leaders of the past you have evoked in your speeches. We are your constituency. We will work tirelessly to bend an intransigent Congress to your will. But first you must tell us, will you fight for a National Single Payer Health Care System?

Sincerely,
Wayne Baum
Salem, Oregon