If, as the Clinton campaign wrote on the message board, it was, in those days, “the Economy, Stupid!” then today it is the public option, stupid.
Why? Because without a public option, the Senate and the House of Representatives are simply talking to themselves, guided and guarded by a health care lobby that has a stranglehold on this economy and on all of us.
In the previous post, “Let’s Use the Obama Method on Health Care. Let’s Act!” we recommended that you make contact with your Senator or House member, and we gave you the addresses. Now it is time to get in touch with the White House. Remind the President that it is “The Public Option.” that is the key to health care reform.
We don’t need no “stinkin’ bipartisanship.” We need accessible health care. The Republicans don’t need it. Their constituents are wealthy bankers, oil men, pharmaceutical industry executives, and corporate executives and lobbyists. Their people have health care. Ours don’t. Small businessmen and the people who work for them. Construction workers, white collar workers, truck drivers, people in health care, child care, and retail employees….and tens of millions of categories…people who work part time and people who fall into that new category in the last 20 years….contract employees. These are the people that corporations employ full time but simply keep off the rolls so that they don’t have to pay them benefits.
It’s a scam and it is one more part of the huge corporate structure created by the Neoconservative Republicans to create a two-class society. The owners and their followers and everyone else. Oh yes, the doctors and the politicians and a few other independent types are in that class. But the basic idea is to take all control away from the working class…to eliminate the power of the middle class and erase it completely.
One of the controlling factors in this is health care. If you do not have health care, you are completely vulnerable. And as long as big corporations can control your health care delivery, they can control you. You can’t leave your job. You can’t move to another community. If you do, you are exposed to potential financial ruin or literally death.
Here are the answers to the Neocon-Republican “scare points.” A public health care program will not ration care any more than care is now rationed. In fact, you will be able to see your doctor more often for less money than you currently can. A public health care plan will not cost you more. It will cost the government more at first, because it has to be established. It will piggy back on the existing Medicare and VA systems and it will eventually bring Medicaid into the system. It will add, or encourage the private health system to add, another 60 million people to health care and no one will feel that they are some kind of “charity case” for simply being an average American citizen.
It will bring down health care costs and make health care for the average citizen both affordable and accessible. You can’t be turned down and you won’t be refused a treatment that you need. If you cannot afford a highly-questionable million-dollar procedure now under private care, you may experience the same under the public system. But you will have care that is as good as everyone else in the country, public or private. Wherever you live, wherever you travel or to whatever area you may decide to move, you will be covered. And your children and your extended family.
If this sounds good to you…use those numbers in the previous post, but in addition, do what the President would want you to do, what he campaigned on and what he expects…stand up for yourself. Contact the White House, www. whitehouse.gov. Send an Email. Write or call. Let him know what you want and what you think you deserve as an American citizen. Give him your encouragement and your support for this plan, the public plan that he initially said that he would fight for. Let him know that you will be at his side. There has been no more important issue in the last 40 years.