Action Alert: Vote for single payer on Obama’s website

Until December 31st, 2008, we have the opportunity to 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, you can submit your own questions which will highlight the inadequacies of the Obama proposal. Sample questions as distributed by Physicians for a National Health Program 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?

Thank you for supporting this effort!