Back to Basics

OBAMA, here is the simple fact. America wants and needs healthcare reform. You will find no argument from republicans or democrats. If you want true healthcare reform, you and the democrats better start listening and communicating honestly to the American people.

Don’t demonize Americans who turn up at town hall meetings because they read HR3200 and are scared of thinking they are about to lose something precious. Explain why you sold out to special interests and are promising to make them a lot of money at our expense.

Team Obama will spend August complaining about right-wing distortion of their healthcare agenda. Or, they can figure out how to tell the truth and then work with the Republicans, or even consider some the bills they have created, that will not destroy the greatest healthcare system in the world, just fix a few of the problems.

Of course, there is also a third America. It is made up of the uninsured poor, who you would have us believe never have a shot at what the rest of the country considers a constitutional right, healthcare. This is just more misinformation to sell the current bill, and we know it. Any American can go to any hospital in the US and get care now – it’s the law – and that care is free of charge. What would even be better is to give these people the opportunity to obtain healthcare insurance like the rest of us, and that is what we all want. There are many bills on the floor that achieve this goal today and all of them are a lot smaller than 1000 plus pages.

All of the bills in Congress address the problem of costly emergency room visits. The Republican solutions do this at a fraction of the 1 trillion dollar price tag that will destroy our current system.

As a presidential candidate, Obama talked about healthcare mostly in connection with his mother’s end-of-life struggle to pay her medical bills. It was an effective anecdote, which he used to launch a broad commitment to reform healthcare as president. In your current proposal your mother would have saved all that money in medical bills because the government would have told her her life wasn’t worth saving and would have given her end-of-life counseling instead. Obama’s reform plan is a complicated political mess while the Republican plans are simple, straight forward, and keep the best healthcare in the world intact.

In recessionary times, the goal is more urgent. Today, more Americans are perched on a precarious financial edge. When a job disappears, employer-supplied health insurance does, too. A doctor’s visit becomes a luxury. Instead of immediately bringing in a child for a strep test, a parent waits out the scratchy throat and puts off the antibiotics that are needed to fight something other than a cold. The Republican plans give every American the choice to buy their own Healthcare plan thereby take the dependence on the employer out of the picture. You would own you own plan and when you left a job your insurance would come with you. This gives you the choice as to the coverage you need and the federal government will even help you pay for that Healthcare plan.

A commitment to change the landscape for the uninsured should take nothing away from those who are lucky enough to have health insurance. But Obama’s Democratic plan will change every Americans healthcare and you will get less and pay more.

Cost is the real enemy of Obama’s agenda. Explaining the cost, while keeping a pledge against raising taxes on the middle class – that’s the hard part. In fact it’s not hard, it’s impossible. Obama has already told America we are out of money so where is the trillions of dollars going to come from? The money question was raised by the Congressional Budget Office. Once the CBO estimated the cost at $1 trillion over10 years, the average American wanted to know how it all adds up, and all we get is a trust me.

Obama, the American people are speaking up all around the country. They want reform, just not yours. They do not want NO CHOICE they want MORE CHOICE. They do not want more control they want less. Above all, Americans do not want the government involved in any of our personal health decisions.

So if you truly want Healthcare reform, look at the Republican Bills, make an honest commitment to work together, and create a bill that all Americans can be proud of.