Convince President Obama to Return to SINGLE PAYER HR676

Dear President Obama:


We applaud you for reopening the national discussion of health care reform, and enthusiastically endorse your call for reform that would assure universal, comprehensive coverage at an affordable price, while improving the quality of care. Yet we are dismayed by recent developments in Washington. The single payer reform that could achieve our shared goals has been dismissed from consideration in favor of proposals that will neither fulfill your promises nor meet our patients%u2019 urgent needs.

The majority of the general public,  believe that single-payer reform is the standard against which other health reforms should be measured. Sound single payer proposals have been introduced in both the House of Representatives (H.R. 676, The U.S National Health Care Act) and the Senate (S. 703, The American Health Security Act of 2009).

Single payer reform, as embodied in these bills, would eliminate the bewildering patchwork of private insurance plans with their exorbitant overhead and profits, as well as the costly paperwork burdens they impose on providers. These savings on bureaucracy - nearly $400 billion annually %u2013 are sufficient to cover all of the uninsured and to provide first dollar coverage for all Americans. No other approach can provide comparable coverage at a cost our nation can afford.

Mr. President, you once embraced a single payer reform that would threaten private insurers, and foresaw its passage if Democrats regained control of the House, the Senate and the White House. These conditions have been met. Yet now Democrats propose diverting additional billions to private insurers by requiring middle class Americans to purchase defective policies from these firms %u2013 policies with so many gaps and loopholes that they currently leave millions of our insured patients vulnerable to financial ruin.

Moreover, a public plan option would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers dominant role. Even a robust public option would forego 90% of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public option would quickly fail in a health care marketplace where competition involves a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by NOT paying for care. But HHS Secretary Sebelius has made clear that any public option will be far worse than that, specifically crafted to prevent it from evolving to a single payer. This kind of public option would amount to a government-run clone of private insurance, reproducing the worst features of private plans.

Mr. President, we ask that you join us in endorsing single payer reform as the only practicable means to reach our shared goals, and H.R. 676 and S. 703 as the appropriate starting point for debate in the House and Senate.

Respectfully,