Got home tonight, checked my email and found a response from Senator Lemar Alexander regarding my inquiry last week about the IBD bill. This email was a little less personal than Senator Corker's but appreciated nevertheless.
"Dear Brent,
Thanks very much for getting in touch with me and letting me know what's on your mind regarding health care reform.
Providing every American with genuine access to quality, affordable health care is one of my highest priorities as a member of the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately, the health care bills we're debating right now flunk their most important test, which is cost. These bills - including the Kennedy health care bill that I voted against in committee on July 15, 2009 - are good faith efforts to find the best way to go in the wrong direction. We have to start over to get it right.
Why do we have to start over? People at home in Tennessee, the Mayo Clinic, 1,000 local chambers of commerce and businesses, Democratic governors, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office all basically say, "These plans have too many problems." Add all those problems up, and this is what you'd get in Tennessee:
• Dumping 300,000 low-income Tennesseans into the failed Medicaid program (known as TennCare in Tennessee), even though right now 40 percent of doctors won't see Medicaid patients. Then they're going to shift the cost to the states after about five years - the equivalent of a 5 percent to 10 percent new state income tax in Tennessee.
• Around 900,000 Tennesseans could be affected by proposed cuts to Medicare.
• Up to 1.6 million Tennessee workers could lose their employer-provided health insurance.
• As many as 2 million Tennesseans are at risk of being forced into a new government-run plan.
I believe that the era of the thousand-page bill is over. The best way to get a result on health care and other major issues facing our nation is to re-earn the trust of the American people by working step by step to begin solving the challenges facing our country. Instead of a trillion-dollar, thousand-page comprehensive health care bill centered around a government-run plan, as a first step we might allow small business pooling to reduce health care costs and increase access to affordable coverage. We could reform medical malpractice laws so runaway junk lawsuits don't continue to drive up the cost of health care. We could allow individual Americans to purchase health care across state lines like they can with their car insurance today. We could enact meaningful insurance market reforms, such as making sure that people aren't disqualified from getting health coverage because of preexisting conditions.
These are some steps we could take in the right direction, which would improve our existing health care system without adding trillions more to the national debt and dumping new debt on the states. I appreciate your taking the time to let me know where you stand on this important issue, and I'll be sure to consider your comments as health care is discussed and debated in Washington and in Tennessee.
Sincerely,
Lamar"
As you can tell this appears to be a generic email response about health care. To be fair, in my email to Senator Alexander, I chose "health care" as the topic of my correspondence. It's now my job to be more aggressive in educating the senator about IBD and more direct in asking for him to co-sponsor the "IBD Research and Awareness Act".
Again, thank you to the senator for sending an email acknowledging my letter and hope to hear more from him in the future.
This is only the first step towards garnering more attention about S. 981!
I encourage all of you to email, write and call your legislators and ask them directly to co-sponsor the "IBD Research and Awareness Act".
This CCFA web page is a great resource and can help you along the way.
Continue to raise awareness about inflammatory bowel disease! We will find a cure!
Cheers,
Brent
No comments:
Post a Comment