"Budget Blow For Health Plan," headlined The Wall Street Journal today. "Congress's Chief Fiscal Watchdog Warns of Overhaul's Cost; Ammunition for Critics."
Congress is spending money like a drunken sailor on weapons and wars, bailouts and stimulus plans and on earmarks but is ready to draw the line against your promises of health care reform. President Obama, we need your leadership.
50 million Americans have no health insurance and most of working America is a job loss away from losing their health insurance. Many millions of Americans are under-insured meaning they're a catastrophic illness or injury away from not being able pay their medical bills nor their other bills.
Cancer for example, could quickly wipe out their coverage and leave them without enough money to pay for the medications and treatments they so desperately need. They could also go through their life savings and even lose their homes.
As a candidate, you promised to "take on" the pharmaceuticals industry, and you gave us marvelous speeches about how you would reform health care coverage and provide it to all. But as President, you've quietly deferred to Congressional leaders to create the programs.
You did this with energy reforms and we have none. What we have is the same non-energy policies we've long had and they serve big oil and other polluters just fine, as they reward their supportive Congressmen and women with campaign contributions.
Now it's your health care reform on the line. Your charismatic speeches aside, what is it you stand for? Originally, you were going to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from Canada and you were going to direct the government to negotiate drug prices rather than pay whatever the pharmaceutical companies dictated. But instead, it's business as usual.
You were also going to encourage competition from far less expensive generic brands but now big pharmaceutical companies are moving through Congress their exclusivity for an additional 12 years!
It's no wonder big pharmaceuticals favor "your" health care reforms. There aren't any. It's like Christmas came early for them.
To be an effective leader, you must create your own plans and walk them through Congress. And when the powerful lobbyists for big pharmaceutical companies, medical insurers or other special interests try to rewrite your programs to serve themselves, you need to appeal to the American people.
To the giant pharmaceutical companies and medical insurers, your promises to the American people are meaningless. Just another politician making empty promises to get elected. But the needs of the American people must come first, ahead of these firms maximizing their profits. Call their CEO's and tell them this. Put your heart into it!
Picture a 6 year old child fighting a deadly cancer. She's thin and frail, her eyes are sunken and dark, and she aches all over her body. She cries out but for now nothing can stop her pain.
Every day, she and her parents struggle through her pain hoping she can be cured. But whether she can even get treatment depends on her parents' medical insurer and the cost of the drugs she needs.
The medical insurer benefits most by rejecting or limiting her treatments. For those she does receive, because of a lack of competition, the pharmaceutical firms can charge a king's ransom, which in turn encourages the medical insurer to reject her claims.
She and her family desperately need an advocate, a leader with power. So do most of the rest of us. As you promised, will you be that advocate?
The intent of this article is not to blame you for the rapidly mounting failures of our government but to appeal to you as a leader and as a man of principle. It's time for you to take action.
And dear reader, if you think you can be uninvolved and the health care system will reform itself, you will be sadly mistaken. Your voice matters and we need to hear it loud and clear.
Dick
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