Healthcare Reform Letter to Senate

Healthcare Reform Letter

To Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid;

First, allow me to offer my most sincere and respectful gratitude for your service to the country. As a public office holder on one of the highest and most visible stages in the world, your job and its attendant responsibilities are considerable and quite challenging. Certainly, we have all seen the firsthand evidence of this over the battle involving the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That this landmark piece of legislation was both passed into legislation and defended by the United States Supreme Court represents a tremendous and exciting step forward in the quest to secure health coverage for all Americans.

Indeed, the facts and figures giving prelude to this legislation provide ample demonstration that the need for reform has been substantial. According to an a Health Affairs article dating to the early part of the Obama Administration, "our health care system is hemorrhaging funds at the rate of 16% of our GDP." (Redig 2009) This observation would underscore a troubling set of realities relating to the general wastefulness of a healthcare system that is inherently designed to maximize corporate profitability over the prioritization of high quality healthcare.

The efforts of which you have been a vocal supporter, to bringing regulatory oversight to private healthcare operations and to extending health coverage to all Americans, are important and admirable. But it is quite clear that this battle is far from over. In protection of the private and corporate interests that form so critical a part of their constituency, Republic leaders have continued their assault on the viability of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Today, this assault takes the form of constant road-blocking of federal funds.

You yourself acknowledged in an interview the other day that a failure of the federal government to secure the proper level of funding for Obamacare could render the otherwise groundbreaking reform package a 'train-wreck.' Given the importance of initial legal victories, this would be a devastating turn of events, the consequences of which would most certaintly be the continued and perhaps even intensified suffering and exclusion of America's countless uninsured. As you so eloquently and accurately stated just this past spring, "I believe that a country of our size, the only superpower left in the world -- it's not right that we have 50-60 million people & #8230; with no health insurance." (Bolton, p. 1)

I believe the same thing. And I also believe that the primary reason that this unacceptable condition has occurred is because the healthcare industry is so grotesquely driven by the aim to profit, as opposed to the ambition of achieving improved healthcare outcomes for all Americans. Therefore, I believe the best way of gaining greater funding for federal reform efforts is to make steeper or more enforceable penalties against health insurance companies who fail to reduce bureaucratic frustration, exploitive cost itemization, arbitrary claim rejection and denial of coverage. Health insurance providers posture as agencies designed to support the health interests of the general public. But in reality, their policies have generally been tilted toward profitability and unabashedly at the expense of both the public health and our economic stability.