Dear President Obama and Staff,
You were elected in large part on the topic of health care reform, including a public option. I voted for you in large part for health care reform, including a public option, only because there were no viable candidates that supported a single payer option, which is the only truly equitable solution. I voted for you because I believe you have intelligence, integrity, and the right intentions.
Unless you are to prove me wrong, you must, must, MUST insist on a full public option if the health care reform you enact is to have any meaning at all.
When I was pregnant with my child during the second Bush administration, I was unmarried to my partner of 10 years, and thus ineligible for his employee-sponsored health insurance. I was a student, and had no health insurance option of my own. And due to my medical history, no for-profit insurance company would offer me any coverage at all, let alone any we could afford. Because my partner, with whom I was (and still am) living, made just over the coverage cutoff, I did not qualify for state-sponsored insurance here in Oregon. I was uninsured and uninsurable, with a baby on the way.
Now, we had chosen to hire a Certified Professional Midwife to attend our birth at home — not because we couldn’t afford the hospital route (though we couldn’t have), but because it is a safe, humane, and yes, economical birth option (which, incidentally, should be covered by any public health care, due to that same safe, humane, and economic nature) — and we were able to work out a payment plan with her. But if I had had to transfer (as do approximately 12% of women who choose homebirth in the United States), the cost of any required hospital care would have crippled* us financially, just as we were starting off our new life as a family of three.
How is this acceptable? How can we purport to be a “world leader” when we lead the world in infant mortality rates, when we are among the last to ensure that all our citizens are insured?
I understand that compromise and cross-aisle support are necessary, but it is essential to remember that a “public option” instead of a saner, safer single payer system is already a compromise, and a gross one. To cave on the public option in the name of “compromise” is to confuse coming to consensus with giving the store away.
You must make good on your promise for meaningful health care reform. Any bill passed without at the very least a public option is no reform at all: it is merely more of the same. That’s not what I voted for.
Sincerely,
Arwyn [last name]
[*Note: this was how I originally typed and sent the letter, but I realized afterward that "crippled" is potentially offensive, and I wish I had used another phrase. I apologize for the ableist language. I am trying to learn better language to avoid slip ups like this in the future.]
Arwyn
In my bathroom hangs a plaque with a picture of a yin yang and the word BALANCE. I can never get it to hang straight. This probably says something deep and meaningful about my life.
hear, hear!
I’m Canadian, so I’m watching this unfold from a place of some detachment, but also bewilderment at the idea that anyone would be denied coverage. I’m really hoping that Obama is able to pull off some real change. Health care is a basic human right, it’s so long past time that all Americans had access to it.
That’s strange, because detached and bewildered is pretty much how I feel. But I think the detachment is self defense, or I’d start losing it, and screaming in the streets, because it’s simply unfathomable that a “public option” is even in question at this point.
Thus my letter: which, incidentally, was the first time I’ve actually written my government representatives (I sent copies to my Senators and Congresspersons as well) in, oh, a decade. I guess blogging is good for something! (Good practice to bloviate about a subject on which I feel quite passionately.)
I can’t even begin to put to words how much I hope and am counting on Obama and his administration to overhaul our health care system. I am blessed to have medical insurance through my employer, cover my son on this plan, and covered my ex on the plan while we were together. At this point if any one of us were to lose the coverage we currently have we would be ineligible for a private plan (each one of us for a different reason). The only option for any of us would be OMIP, which a friend just told me for her family of four would cost nearly $1300 a month. Cost-prohibitive does not even begin to describe the first thought that came to my mind when I heard that. It is high time that everyone has access to health care – whether they can afford it or not.
It drives me nuts that all the Republicans do is criticize the public plan and don’t provide any solution for the uninsured Americans.
Read a good article about how protesters are on Medicare and happy with it, but don’t want the same type of coverage for those under 65. Government-run health care doesn’t seem to be a problem for them personally.
http://crosscut.com/2009/08/18/health-medicine/19171/?pagejump=1
OMG, the statement toward the end of that article about paying for benefits for “illegal aliens” gives me shivers down my spine. That is just scary stuff
It is interesting to me that the protestors on Medicare were happy with the coverage. I work with some people who simply do not understand how it works at all so they don’t use it. It is not an easy system to understand without inside help. My ex (who is 32 years old and has Medicare and Medicare’s supplemental insurance) does not like it but can’t get coverage elsewhere. I wonder if the “supplemental insurance” the people in the article were talking about is the Medicare supplemental insurance. Hmmm.