I believe strongly in a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, as I’ve written about before in covering here the interview of Dr. Quentin Young by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Though I don’t know how much good it will do, I wrote a letter to Pres. Obama  to urge him not to take the single-payer option off the table in his current discussions.  Paul Krugman has a great op-ed piece at the NYT, that you can read [1] here.

I urge you and your friends and family to send similar letters on health care reform to the President if you share my beliefs that we need a single-payer system.

Here’s the letter I sent to our President today:

President Obama,
I voted for you and convinced others to vote for you.  Your intelligence and oratory abilities are very welcome after 8 years with your predecessor.  Since I understand that you do actually read some of the mail sent to you as time permits, I hope this e-mail gets passed on to you.

As happy as I am to have you as my President and as much as I admire your considerable talents and abilities, I (and many many others I know) am profoundly disappointed by what appears to be your current position on healthcare reform.  Earlier in your career, you supported a single-payer system (and had views on healthcare which seemed much more in keeping with those of many Americans who in survey after survey have indicated a strong preference for a single-payer system) but now appear to have completely regressed on that position, to the extent that you now are not even inviting your former advisor on healthcare reform, Dr. Quentin Young, to your White House discussions on the subject. 

I don’t understand why you have taken the discussion of single-payer system entirely off the table.  I don’t buy your public statements that we can’t start over from scratch and have to work with what we have.  FDR made major changes when the times called for it–so can you, with the help of Congress.

Please don’t cave into the HMO, Insurance and Pharmaceutical lobbies and end up with a solution which only appears to solve the problem and in reality is just a bad compromise that merely preserves the existing broken system to the benefit of the business interests behind it!  A majority of doctors and nurses support a single-payer system…if it’s not an option, why are so many healthcare professionals like Dr. Quentin Young so strongly behind it?

The current healthcare system is crippling private business, crippling hard-working Americans who play by the rules, and more than anything, is a big waste of the taxpayers’ money.

Your legacy ultimately will derive from what you do for the environment, (so that your children and mine can survive), what you do to reform healthcare, and what you do to restore sanity to American Foreign Policy.  Please don’t let this leg of the tripod remain ‘business as usual".