In this topsy turvy world I find myself in, where I've spent the last couple of months holding Senator Wyden's feet to the fire on health care while repeatedly praising my weak 2nd choice of 2008, Jeff Merkley, here's another round: while Barack Obama and Harry Reid try to hint Wyden into dumping his Health Americans Act, Merkley is back from recess with a renewed committment to substantive reform, and wants you to know about it. So in full, Merkley's statement (and note once more his strong advocacy for a full and robust public option, which I call FRPO):
At the beginning of July, I held town hall meetings in Umatilla, Polk, Clackamas, Linn, Marion, and Multnomah Counties. At each meeting, the most prominent issue of concern was health care.
People of all walks of life are paying dramatically more for health care than they used to. These high costs are hurting our families and our small businesses. Last year, we spent 17 percent of our gross domestic product on health care; in the last nine years, costs have doubled for the average family. In May, Oregon’s largest insurer announced that the average small business premium was going up 14.7 percent -- on top of a 26 percent increase last year. Health care costs are an increasing drag on our economy and the pocketbooks of working families.
In my role on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, I’ve been working with my colleagues on a plan for health care reform that will lower costs, provide consumers with more choices, and increase competition.
The change would work like this: Americans who are happy with their current health plan can keep it. But if you don’t like your plan and you want to look at other options, we’re going to make sure you have a choice of quality, affordable health plans. This will lower costs and it will also force insurance companies to provide better services to their customers.
One of those options will be a community health insurance plan offered by the federal government. This public option will be an additional choice to increase competition, lower prices, and keep insurance companies honest, so families won’t be entirely at the mercy of the insurance companies. Most Oregonians I’ve talked to – and about three-quarters of Americans according to the polls – like the idea of having a choice of what type of plan they want rather than having the federal government make that decision for them.
Over the next few months, we’ll be engaging in a nationwide discussion about the direction of health care in our country. We’ll have before us a choice between a system that gets more and more expensive every year, leaves middle class families one pink slip from losing their health coverage, and makes our businesses less competitive, or an improved model that increases health care options, expands care, and lowers costs. I don’t think we can afford to do nothing.
We have a once in a generation opportunity to remake our health care system for the better. I invite you to contact my office and talk to your friends and family about your opinion because we can only enact real change if you make your voices heard.
Two interesting and potentially game-changing happenings went down yesterday, both of which would seem to be positives for the drive to see a full and robust public option (FRPO) included in any health care reform bill that passes Congress. Plus I've got news of a demonstration in Portland that goes even beyond that, and continues to press for action on a single-payer plan.
First, the President made front page news in The Oregonian this morning, by commenting at some length on the health care bill being carried by Senator Ron Wyden. Obama was as usual polite and mostly glancing in his criticisms, but he was indeed critical of the plan:
"There are a lot of good concepts to what Ron's proposing," Obama said. But despite his professed agreement with "90 percent" of Wyden's thinking, he said parts of the plan are too "radical" for the country.
Wyden argues that linking health care costs to individuals will promote competition and drive down costs. But Obama said that is too sharp a departure from what workers have known -- and become comfortable with -- for generations.
That fundamental shift, along with the major changes in the tax code that Wyden proposes, are too "radical," Obama said, when aligned with all the other changes that must take place to provide health insurance to 47 million Americans who don't have it.
The president said his discussions with Wyden are similar to those with people who advocate a single-payer system. In theory, those plans work, he said. "The problem is, we have evolved partly by accident into an employer-based system."
A "radical restructuring" would meet "significant political resistance," Obama said, and "families who are currently relatively satisfied with their insurance but are worried about rising costs ... would get real nervous about a wholesale change."
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