Pass Health Reform Now!

Keep fighting for real health reform!

Greetings,

Please keep fighting for the comprehensive reform legislation. Please support the use of reconciliation to make the necessary improvements to the Senate bill so that both houses can pass the reconciliation bill and the House can pass the Senate bill.

Many progressive forces are coalescing around the strategy of passing the Senate bill with necessary changes incorporated in a reconciliation bill.

This is a big complex problem. The solution requires a set of interdependent pieces:
Insurance reforms - getting rid of pre-existing condition exclusions, and rescissions - require an individual mandate, so that as many people as possible are covered. This spreads the risk and shares the cost. It also requires national, system-wide application. Only the House bill requires this.
An individual mandate requires affordable coverage. Only the House bill has adequate subsidies for low-income people (two-thirds of the uninsured have incomes below 200% of the poverty line)
Subsidies require adequate and fair financing: An employer mandate provides a significant source of financing and ensures that insurance reforms benefit employees with employer-sponsored insurance. Only the House bill has an employer mandate;
An income tax surcharge on millionaires is a fair and effective source of
revenue.
Enforcing these insurance reforms and ensuring access to adequate and affordable coverage requires the creation of a new public institution—the insurance
Exchange. A national Exchange, as provided in the House bill will have far greater leverage with insurers, offer a much more compelling market and hence generate more price competition, than the state-based Exchanges contained in the Senate bill.
A public plan, included within the insurance Exchange, will offer more cost-
effective coverage than private insurers and thus generate additional price competition within the Exchange. It also guarantees the choice of an accountable public plan. Many recent polls indicate that public support for a public plan continues to be extremely high!
Finally, adequate financing requires effective cost containment.

Many polls indicate that the public wants stronger, not weaker, reform measures. For example, a national poll conducted by CBS in January found that more people felt that reforms didn’t go far enough than felt they went too far in covering people or regulating insurers. The Research 2000 poll conducted on election night in Massachussets found that more Obama voters sat out the election because the health reform legislation didn’t go far enough than because it went too far. The Massachusetts vote was not a vote against reform!

Recent polls in 10 frontline House freshman districts show:

68% of voters want a public health insurance option
By 5 to 1, voters want their Representative to fight to add the public option over passing the Senate bill
By 3 to 1, persuadable voters are less likely to vote for the local Democrat if Congress doesn't pass a public option as part of reform
55% say Democrats need to do more to fight big corporations
56% say Democrats haven't done enough to fulfill Obama's 2008 campaign promises
52% of Democrats are less likely to vote in 2010 if Congress doesn't pass public option -- Republicans more likely

There is no serious possibility of gaining Republican support for any meaningful reform Republican proposals are still focused on controlling health costs by making people pay more, and hence use less, and making coverage more affordable by deregulating insurers and allowing them to offer stripped down coverage which often is so minimal that enrollees cannot afford the cost-sharing required if they want to actually use health care.

If we don’t do this now, if we back away and allow a time-out for what will be a futile search for scaled-back measures or bipartisan support, we will end up with nothing. And we will not have another opportunity for decades to win the kind of comprehensive reform that is absolutely essential to effectively addressing our health care crisis.

Not only is it the right thing to do, you will have far more political support if you keep up the strongest possible fight for comprehensive reform.

Thank you for your efforts, and please don’t stop now!

[Your name]