February, 2008

            Americans everywhere are thinking about what concerns them most as they look at you and decide whether you are worthy of their vote.   Those concerns cover a broad range of issues.   For some nothing else is as important as national security or deciphering your stance on gay marriage.   For others issues such as education and the environment are the most important.   But across the country health care and health care reform consistently rank high on every poll.   So it is refreshing to see that across the spectrum all of you address health care in some manner.   But we who will employ one of you as our next President have some concerns.

            First, several of you mention in your position papers on health care how health care models at the state level would be useful to the process of national health care reform.   We, the American people could not agree with you more.   So we must wonder why you are waiting for the election to move that process along.   Three of you are senators and could add your names as sponsors of the Feingold/Graham State Based Health Care Reform Act (S 1169) but none of you has done so.   Should we be concerned that you are less than sincere in your desire to create a climate for real health care reform?

            A second concern is your mistaken notion that our health care crisis is about the 47 million Americans who have no health care insurance.   Those 47 million people are not the problem.   Those 47 million people are the initial victims of a flawed system that will only create more victims if we do nothing or if we adopt the plans some of you have proposed.   Should we be concerned that you look at 47 million uninsured Americans and fail to see the real problem?   We have created a system that has shut the door on 47 million Americans, but that system has also put a roughly equal number of people into the uncomfortable position of choosing between medicine and other basics of life or the untenable position of impending medical bankruptcy because the insurance they did have was not enough to handle the problem.

            Third, we are concerned that you see mandates to buy insurance as the solution to the problem.   Mandates have been tried in several states, and they have not worked there.   To assume they would then work at the federal level is the thinking of an irrational mind.   Further, mandates lock in everything that is broken about our present system.   Mandates assure that high administrative costs will continue to increase the price of the health care we receive.   Mandates mean insurance companies will continue to trample on the sacredness of the doctor-patient relationship insisting that the doctor practice cost containment while the insurance company practices medicine.   Mandates mean necessary procedures will still be denied.   Mandates mean our health care will be in the hands of a corporation whose first legal obligation is to protect the investment of the stockholders—not to deliver health care.   Should we be concerned that your support for mandates may hint that you owe too much to the insurance industry to put our health care needs above their prosperity?

            Finally, more than half of all Americans would like to see single payer health care put in place as the solution to our health care crisis, and that number is growing.   Yet you and other politicians dismiss single payer health care as a chimera not worthy of your attention.   If you hold the opinion of the majority of Americans in such disdain, should we be concerned about hiring you as our next President?

Sincerely,

Richard Gingery, M. D.

President, Health Care for All Colorado