Tell Obama to Push for Single-Payer Health Care

Dear PNHP Members and Friends,

Please use the Obama web site to vote your support for the
single-payer position. The Obama transition team is soliciting
questions from the public via their web site. Visitors may "vote" for
the best questions, which will then be responded to by the Obama team.

As of this writing, single-payer questions have been voted #2 and #3
under the "health care" section. Please help us vote them to the top
and send a strong message to the Obama team and the new Congress that
the American public favors single payer, not incremental band-aids.

http://change.gov/openforquestions

In addition, we encourage you to submit your own questions which will
highlight the inadequacies of the Obama proposal. Sample questions are
reprinted below the instructions which follow:

________________________________

Instructions for Voting / Submitting Questions

1. Visit http://change.gov/openforquestions

2. Click the small "Sign In" text on the right-hand side of the
screen. Sign-in with your email and password on the right. (If you
haven't signed-in before, just fill out the short form on the left.)

3. Under "pick a topic" on the left-hand side of the screen, click
"health care."

4. Questions will appear in a box in the middle. Skip the large
question in the blue box and scroll down. Immediate below the large
blue question will be leading questions. Two excellent ones should be
near the top:

"We all recognize the insurance industry is the problem, not lack of
insurance--what are you going to do about getting single payer
(government) health care, as other progressive countries throughout
the industrialized world have done?"

"What are the obstacles to implementing the single-payer health care
used in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia? With a growing
number of unemployed or underemployed in 2009, will your
administration work towards single-payer as a goal?"

(Note: More good questions may have appeared by the time you read
this. You may want to examine others if you have time)

5. To vote for these questions, click the small "check" box beside it.

6. To Submit a question, click the "submit a question" box at the
bottom of the screen and type it in. Here are some example questions:

Employer-based coverage continues to steadily deteriorate, leaving
millions without access to care due to costs and hundreds of thousands
facing medical bankruptcy even though they're insured. Why should we
use this defective system as the as the foundation of reform when
research shows single-payer national health insurance could provide
comprehensive, universal care for no more than we're paying now?

Subsidy and individual mandate schemes have failed to achieve
universal coverage anywhere they've been tried…including most recently
in Massachusetts. Rather than reprising these mistakes, wouldn't it be
better to move to a proven system - single-payer national health
insurance - which has already afforded other industrialized countries
healthier populations at lower costs?

Sincerely,

Quentin Young, MD
National Coordinator
Physicians for a National Health Program

(h/t to Brent Miller via e-mail)