My letter to Sen. Tom Udall - updated to add header

Here is what my junior Senator, Tom Udall, has on his website:

Health Care
To provide every American with quality health care, control skyrocketing costs, and ensure patients have choices, we need to dramatically improve our health care system. Congress has already passed legislation to ensure that 11 million children have health insurance. We have also begun the process of reforming the health care system to cover every American man, woman and child. America deserves a health care system that reflects the ingenuity and compassion of the American people. President Obama has pledged to push for broad health care reform, and I will work with him and my colleagues in the U. S. Senate to enact a plan that increases coverage, improves quality of care, reduces costs, and refocuses our system on preventing illness and promoting wellness.

OK, Tom is a junior senator just getting his feet wet. Still, I would like something more forceful.

Here is what I wrote to him tonight.

Dear Senator Udall:

I was happy to support you and vote for you last fall and hope the first year in the Senate has not been too traumatic.

I appreciate your comments: "America deserves a health care system that reflects the ingenuity and compassion of the American people. President Obama has pledged to push for broad health care reform, and I will work with him and my colleagues in the U. S. Senate to enact a plan that increases coverage, improves quality of care, reduces costs, and refocuses our system on preventing illness and promoting wellness."

I would love to hear more specifics and am more than happy to share with you what I wish to see in health care reform.

First and foremost, I believe that without a strong public option there will be no leverage to change how health care is done in this nation, nothing that will pressure the insurance companies to focus more on the collective well being and less on their usurious profits. I would like to see you push for a strong public option. Without it I think any reform is mere window dressing.

Additionally, I hope you are pushing for legislating an end to rescission, to denial based on pre-existing conditions, and to caps that leave people with catastrophic illness bankrupt.

Co-ops are not a sufficient substitute for a public option.

Thank you for your service. Please fight for the People.

--the BB