Sen. Michael Bennet from Colorado is circulating a letter to Majority Leader Reid, calling for passing a health care bill with a public option through budget reconciliation – a process that only requires 51 votes in the Senate. Virginia Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner have not signed on to support this initiative, in spite of the fact that they have each, according to the list, received over 200 telephone calls and over 2,000 petition signatures.
It is time we asked our Virginia senators to consider being the plow and not the boulder.
The numbers of calls and petition signatures from Virginians to Senators Webb and Warner are small. Virginia is a strong pro-business state with a large health insurance lobby. A public option would certainly hurt health insurance companies, but it would help literally everyone else — government, businesses, and individuals. Single payer insurance, which has never been placed on the table, would reduce costs even more quickly than a public option. Everyone already knows this.
Money from the insurance company lobbyists has fueled fear and misinformation from the TEA Party movement and gone directly to senatorial campaigns with the sole purpose of maintaining the conspicuous profitability of the “business” of health insurance. These businesses operate at a great expense to individuals, local government, small business, states, and the federal government. Public money as well as private money flows in to them, and they have consistently raised prices and increased their own profits at the expense of everyone else. While we hear the conservative voices cry “no new taxes,” governments and schools go broke and the insurance companies raise “taxes” on all of us with no restraints at all.
It is time to look realistically at the rising cost of health insurance and to recognize that if our federal taxes actually paid for our health care we could have better and pay less.
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