Victoria Brownworth

it’s another rainy saturday on the east coast and i was answering email and watching a vegan cooking show on PBS simultaneously.(christina cooks. her food looks delicious and is so healthy, you can feel positively pious about eating it.) in among this morning’s email was a request to sign an emergency petition to president obama about the public option. (to sign, go here info@boldprogressives.org )

i signed, of course, but i just wonder: why are we still having this same argument and why is obama so lacking in clarity on this issue?

sen. olympia snowe (R-ME) doesn’t want the public option. she wants the trigger to the public option, which basically means if the planets align and the world is coming to an end and capitalism dies, we’ll get the public option, and she’s the only republican who has signed on to health care reform.

so what? why is the president–the democratic president who was elected by mostly democrats being held hostage by a republican from maine where, i will add, there is 16 percent unemployment and some of the worst health care in the country.

obviously i am not the only progressive getting mad as the proverbial hatter over this nonsense on the public option or i wouldn’t be getting emails about it first thing on a saturday morning.

that said, where is the progressive outcry and why are we allowing obama to shunt us and the public option aside for one republican from maine?

i live in the fifth most populous state and fifth most populous city in america. philadelphia is also, regrettably, the poorest of the top ten most populous cities in the country and our citizens have the least access to affordable health care as a consequence. i personally have to pay $900 a month for my HMO from blue cross and it is much more than i can afford. but i have pesky pre-existing conditions and so have never been able to allow my heath coverage to lapse for a second over the past 25 years since i first had cancer surgery in my 20s.

i want the president to understand that health care reform as it is currently written does not help most of us. not one whit. we not only need the public option, we need caps on premiums (my premium has doubled in five years–doubled).  we need the closest thing to universal health care that we can get and we need to stop caring about the republicans who won’t vote for it regardless calling it socialized medicine. the majority of them are on medicare anyway. which is, thank you FDR, socialized medicine.

most of us want what congress has. we want what keith olbermann has been calling “medicare for everyone.” i know i do.

explain to me who deserves not to have health care coverage and why?

there’s no excuse for us being stymied in the same way we were 16 years ago when hillary clinton was attempting to get these very same reforms through congress. it’s 2009. in a society where the majority of americans claim to be moral at their core, how do we justify not taking care of everyone equally?

right–we can’t. let obama and your congresspeople know, today.—vab