Letter to Senator Cantwell about health care

Listen to the pod cast of the show - an amazing conversation with small business owners in the PNW

Dear Senator Cantwell,

I heard you the other day on KUOW discussing health care reform with Steve Sher. I don't believe your argument that co-ops are the only option. The world is very diferent now from when the prescription drug option was passed.

As I'm sure you know, the American public is overwhelmingly in support of a public option for health care, far more so than Congress seems willing to support with real legislation. Your admission that small businesses simply lack clout was appreciated for its honesty, but was also completely unacceptable. I absolutely need you as my representative to push forward a bolder vision as espoused by your colleague representative McDermott advocated on the program before you.

As I'm sure you also know, without the heavy hand of a large public plan such as the one enjoyed by Congressional representatives such as yourself, cost controls will never be implemented. Without cost control, our problem will never go away.

I know it may appear like an uphill battle from within the beltway (where I was born and raised), but the rest of the country, at least me and all the other small business employees I know, are not going to accept a middle way compromise that does not radically change the costs of health care itself. The problem is not that people don't have insurance; the problem is that health care is so expensive and provides so little value in return for the dollars spent when benchmarked against every other health care outcome metric in the industrialized world.

I laud your position that health care providers need a better value metric that correlates with outcomes rather than paying for services, which we all know thanks to Atul Gawande, incents incredibly bad behavior. However, better metrics need to be directly tied to value and payment, they are not a solution in and of themselves.

It is not acceptable to allow a few die hard right wing blowhards and timid middle-of-the-road representatives to say that we can't do what we all know is both morally just and economically required to create better health care outcomes, cover all citizens, and lower costs, which is a true public health care plan that provides all the benefits and costs of the plan enjoyed by congressional representatives.