Mr. President:
To paraphrase Kenny The Dee's recent Diary Entry, I couldn't be more pleased that you were elected President. You can communicate effectively, have a sustainable vision for our country, and are willing to listen to and cultivate both progessive and conservative initiatives alike as long as they meet the litmus test of "functional". And, as though I don't agree with every action you've taken, I'm very pleased overall with the direction our country seems to be headed in.
Except in one, major functional area: Health Care.
I spent a lot of time on whitehouse.gov today preparing to listen to your online web-town-hall "experiement." I hope it's an experiment you repeat because I think it went very well. It is a good opportunity for you to get out of the bubble (or us to break into it) that so typically surrounds most elected officials, the President included.
In that time, I found an interesting piece of information -- that, although you tout HealthCare reform as one of your big four priorities, along with economic recovery, energy, and education, you still haven't filled your HHS cabinet post. There's neither a confirmed or proposed candidate listed. For it being such a major priority, it's pretty inexcusable that you haven't filled that slot yet, don't you think? I mean, we've managed to fill everything else, even the ones that aren't in your "big-4" priority list. We need someone other than you in a role that can fight for healthcare reform 24/7/365. You're doing a great job but you have a lot of other things on your plate, and this is too important a fight to only devote 25% (or less) attention to.
And everyone -- including you -- recognizes the importance of this battle(with another quote from KennyTheDee):
And the number one item on my wishlist, universal health care, got a strangely unconvincing answer from you in your digital town hall meeting on 3/26/09. I don't have a transcript in front of me, but it seems to me I heard you say that we couldn't have single-payer because, at least in part, some people aren't used to that, that they're used to getting insurance through their employer or in some other way. Well, Mr. President, we're used to a lot of things that don't work, and for more and more Americans getting health insurance from their employer is becoming one of these things.
Kenny is right. You didn't answer that question very well -- but you answered many of them extremely well, including the very last web question from the 3 kent-state students about education. From The National Post:
12:14 p.m.: Kent State Univeristy students in a cutesy video, hey man what about higher education? Obama talks about giving student loans directly to students, instead of letting banks and other middlemen make cash off the administration of same.
Mr. President, in your answer you said that it was unconsciable that we pay let banks make billions off of loans that essentially are made by the Government (since we guarantee them) when we could simply make the loans directly. Why is that solution not an adequate one for healthcare? After all:
- It would be no more difficult for students to get their loans from the government directly than it would be for employees to get their healthcare from the government directly. Many already do and the infrastructure is in place for both.
- If it is unreasonable to have a bank mediate in the case of student loans, why would we tolerate the "legacy" of insurance companies, who have an even more active role in mediating our healthcare system?
- If the government is going to back student loans, and make the profits off of of them that would otherwise go to banks (or simply make more of them available to more people in lieu of "profits", wouldn't it make sense to back health insurance and make the profits (or offer better coverage to more people) off that directly as well? Last I checked we have a huge deficit and insurance companies haven't performed too badly in bottom-line results.
I know you won't read this, but I suspect that, if you keep doing what you did today, the bubble will eventually burst enough that you hear others like-minded to me -- like Gov. Dean (MD) and Dr. Richter and the many thousands of others who believe sincerely that this is the way to go.
Maybe you're right -- we have to do this incrementally because there are 41 3-year-olds in Congress holding things up. But you have the right thought process. It's why we elected you (Frankly, it's nice to have a president with ANY thought process). But you promised to do ideas that work. I think if you have a thought that works to make a government service like student loans more available to those in need, it's not a huge leap to apply that same logic to healthcare.