Email from Progressive Democrats of America, 6/30/09

The CBO has dealt a blow to healthcare reform proposals in Congress with the projection that current legislation will add $1 trillion in costs over the next ten years, and it will leave millions of people without healthcare. Medicare for all remains the one solution that will cover everybody and contain costs. Ask the committee chairmen working on healthcare legislation to have the CBO score, cost out and compare HR 676 to the other reforms. Click here for contact info and talking points.

Keep the heat on President Obama. This Wednesday, July 1, Pres. Obama will hold a national discussion on healthcare through an online town hall meeting at the NVCC Annandale campus, 8333 Little River Turnpike Annandale, Virginia. In addition to the live audience, questions will come from online communities such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Click here to participate. Read the rest of this entry »

Jun 29, 2009 7:22 PM

I continue to believe that single-payer universal health insurance would provide the best health care for all Americans. Since Senator Baucus and other powers that be have decreed that the most sensible plan cannot be discussed, then my bottom-line compromise is the so-called public option that is open to all. Anything less will turn out to be a giant Medicare Part D: billions for corporations and doughnut holes for sick people. In that case, I’ll be urging you to vote against the bill, and we’ll start again in 2011 with a more amenable set of senators and representatives.

Thanks for asking!

Joy Matkowski

email from MediaMatters, 6/29/09

Dear Friend,

Given the importance and complexity of health care reform, it is critical that media report on the subject fairly and accurately. Unfortunately, a recent front-page article in the Washington Post by reporter Ceci Connolly failed on both counts.

In the June 28 article, Connolly, quoting Change Congress’ interim executive director Adam Green, wrote the following:

Green, in an interview, was hard-pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan but said that it “has become a proxy for the question of Democrats who stand on principle and represent their constituents.”

Connolly’s assertion was deeply flawed and misleading. Read the rest of this entry »

letter sent to Daily Local News, 5/28/09, not published:

The daily mud being thrown at U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, by all the bigots coming out of their caves brings back painful memories of personal experiences I had hoped would be unbelievable for today - but, sadly, which are still the experiences of too many people.

As a newly minted lawyer in 1974, I was hired as director of a Philadelphia corporate legal department; and my first priority was to hire two lawyers. When I told my superior that I had chosen, for the first position, a Latina lawyer who had been tops in her class at her American college and law school, his first question was: “But how is her English?” That Latina lawyer went on to become “the first” in so many roles in public service and private law practice that I lost count of all her achievements years ago. (She’s also a friend of Judge Sotomayor’s.) I told her this story recently, and she said I’d never told her before - and she cried. She also said that no one else would hire her then. Read the rest of this entry »

letter in the Inquirer:

It is disappointing that the news media, including The Inquirer, have chosen to ignore a serious and obvious flaw in the current effort to reform health care.

President Obama takes the correct position of providing affordable health care to all, a belief shared by most, if not all, Americans. Yet the direction of reform being formulated by his congressional colleagues is to provide health-care insurance to all.

This is a huge disconnect. Providing insurance coverage will not bring down the cost of health care. It may shift costs to taxpayers, but it will not decrease those costs.

Health-care reform should be focused upon identifying and lowering the underlying cost drivers in the health-care system.

John Carr
Washington Crossing

Philadelphia Inquirer, Jun. 9, 2009, p. A2

A GOP warning on health plan
Republican senators tell Obama not to insist on creating a Medicare-like health insurance option.

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Obama is making a mistake on health care by insisting on a government insurance option for the middle class, influential Republicans said in a letter to the White House released yesterday.

It could cost him a chance to have support across the political divide, the nine lawmakers, all members of the Senate Finance Committee, warned.

Leaders of the Finance Committee, which has the best odds of producing a bipartisan bill, are working against a self-imposed deadline for moving the legislation through committee this month. But tensions have risen since Obama recently affirmed his support for including the option of a public insurance plan. Read the rest of this entry »

“Pennsylvania politicians, unfortunately, have been more concerned about pork and patronage than national issues.”

— Political pollster and analyst Terry Madonna.

Quoted in  “Specter’s shift: Just noise,” the Philadelphia Inquirer,  Jun. 10, 2009 p. A15, by Albert R. Hunt

letter in Daily Local News, 6/9/09:

Statistics say that nearly 10 percent, one in 10, of Americans are unemployed. Those figures hide those who have stopped working, those who run their own businesses and are suffering, and many millions more. Another recent statistic revealed that, in Pennsylvania, Chester County has the fastest growing rate of unemployment. All around us, our families, friends, and neighbors are suffering, often in silence. This is the suffering amongst us that is not reaching the newspaper pages or the airwaves.

As I write this letter in the very early morning, thousands of people in Chester County are lying awake worrying about either having lost or keeping their jobs, finding new ones or figuring how to make ends meet on meager government subsidies and rapidly diminishing savings, worrying about how to get medical treatment when they cannot afford it or what to pay for today — medical treatment or food or utilities or rent or the mortgage or the car payment — worrying about how to explain to their children their rapidly deteriorating lifestyles and the preparations they must make for new lives as they leave the middle class. Read the rest of this entry »

by email, 6/8/09:

President Obama has made health care reform a top priority, but with powerful interests preparing to defeat his plan, he’s in for the political fight of his life.

Your voice is essential to win this once-in-a-generation opportunity for real change.

This week, Senate leaders are introducing legislation to rein in exploding health care costs and ensure quality care. Doctors and nurses, AARP, labor unions and small business owners are all lining up with us to support reform. Our researchers have begun documenting the severity of the problem, and our advocates are in Washington, D.C., sharing the facts and pushing for real reform.

So who’s pushing back? Just follow the money to see who benefits from the current system. Read the rest of this entry »

TO: NEW YORK TIMES LETTERS 6/6/09 (not published there)
RE: WORLD CLASS LEADER

President Obama’s recent historic trip to the Middle East and Europe, with the inspiring speeches at both Cairo and Normandy, again showed him to be a world class leader with a first rate vision.  The visits probably marked a new chapter in our relations to both the Muslim world and European allies.

This is the kind of leadership and vision that a large majority of Americans voted for this past November.  In these difficult times at home and abroad, let’s give the new president and administration all the support that we possibly can, and not be deterred by lesser leaders and dimmer visions.

Rev. David W. Long
West Chester, PA