Reply #56: My E-mail from last night

[creeksneakers2]

You can forget about getting any support from me again unless you straighten yourselves out. I'm mad that Obama is dumping the public option.

You've caved to the right wing and you will never get back on your feet again. They've seen they can make you cave. Now they are drunk with the success of their vandalism. They'll only get worse.

The public option wasn't just the most important part of health care, it was the only important part. Forcing insurance companies to enroll people who are already sick is unfair to the insurance companies and will encourage people not to buy insurance until they have problems. You've traded that for promising to subsidize millions of people's private insurance policies. The reason people are losing patience with you is that you've bailed out banks and auto companies. Now you are giving a giant bailout to the insurance industry. Why not just let the insurance companies reject who they want and find their own customers who have their own money? With no alternative for the public left, what's to stop them from demanding larger and larger government handouts? All you are doing now is turning the rest of the public against you. You've made the same crooked deals with pharmaceutical companies. The government should be able to negotiate lower drug prices for the drugs it buys. How could you trade away that?

The fairest way to deal with people with severe pre-existing conditions is to allow them to join a public plan. The risk should be spread though taxes, not by making others pay more for their health care.

You also got yourselves and the rest of this mess in the first place by conceding the idea of simply expanding medicare and letting people buy in. Polls show what the public wants most from health care reform is cost savings. Medicare could provide health care for far less than private insurance. It pays lower fees and has lower administrative costs. Expanding medicare would provide proven savings. The people who scared the country with lies about death panels and other problems wouldn't have been able to do it if all that was being done was an expansion of medicare. People know what medicare is and trust it. Competition from expanded medicare would have forced private insurance companies to provide better quality or lower prices.

That one simple plan, expanding medicare, would have accomplished all the main objectives. Why wasn't it done that way in the first place? Medical providers probably didn't like lower fees. Insurance companies didn't want competition. So you've traded away to those people too. What do you have left? Nothing that anybody can support. You've traded away all the advantages of public health care for the support of groups that only were after their own advantages and never could have stopped a good plan for expanding medicare. Those groups are no help to you now. You have nothing left to sell.

Scrap everything and go back to the beginning and just try to expand medicare. Its your only hope.