Be active!

Writing a letter to the editor and getting it published turned out to be easier than I thought. The important points seem to include [UPDATE: I just found PNHP's LTE guidelines, with many sample letters]:

1. Respond to something recently published (so watch your local paper carefully for an opening).

2. Make your response specific to the piece you're responding to. Add a point that was relevant, but not mentioned. Give evidence contradicting something you disagree with. Be very specific and factual. See Physicians for a National Health Progam's web site for a ton of well-verified factual material, including a video of President Obama delivering his famous 2003 quote for single payer. For a local angle on the facts, probably a selling point for your letter, look up your local activists, who probably have at least a modest web presence. Perhaps your local municipality has endorsed HR676 (lots have!).

3. Look at the letters that have been published on similar topics. Imitate their length, format, and rhetoric. If I were an editor, I would just love a letter that can be published without any tweaking.

4. Use your newspaper's on-line submission process. Almost as easy as breaking up with your boyfriend by email!

5. Sound moderate but not apologetic. Remember we are the main stream.

Here's a letter one of our local activists got published last summer, in response to an opinion column by the late, great Clarke Thomas (the "mystery" is why so few business people support single payer):

Bravo to Clarke Thomas for his excellent column "A Health-Care Mystery," in which he advocates for single-payer health-care reform as good for business and good for us all. Indeed, single-payer is the most socially and fiscally responsible option available, cutting out insurance company profits and waste, while providing excellent coverage to everyone.

Many people are confused by the concept of single-payer. Mr. Thomas correctly points out that traditional Medicare is a single-payer system, which millions of Americans depend on. The government pays the bills, but the providers remain private.

The support for single-payer health-care reform is growing. HR 676, "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All," has more congressional support than any other health-care bill in Congress.

Single-payer is good for business, but also good for labor. More labor unions support HR 676 than any other health-care bill in Congress, with endorsements from 37 state AFL-CIO's, including Pennsylvania, 18 international unions and 455 union organizations in 49 states.

There is a growing grass-roots movement across the country advocating for national single-payer health-care reform, including Physicians for a National Health Program, the National Nurses Organizing Committee and Healthcare-NOW. Regionally, the Western PA Coalition for Single-Payer Healthcare is advocating for the passage of HR 676. For more information, go to www.WPaSinglePayer.org.

Here's another:

Clarke Thomas ("A Health-Care Mystery," Sept. 3) has it exactly right: It is indeed a mystery why business leaders are not pushing for universal single-payer health insurance coverage. In this respect we are behind Canada and western Europe, and it has not been a matter of contention between different political parties.

As for "socialism," conservative heads of state like Margaret Thatcher in England and Nicolas Sarkozy in France have been supportive of their national health programs. And, of course, we have our own successful government health program in the Veterans Administration. I recently learned from a friend temporarily in Taiwan that it has a national health program that made it easier for him to see a medical specialist in a modern hospital there than in his HMO in Colorado.

National single-payer health systems are more efficient than multiple insurance companies because they do not have expensive advertising costs (have you been seeing the TV ads?) or expensive salaries and stock options for top administrators.

A good start, which will not happen until we get a new administration in Washington, would be to reduce the age of eligibility to Medicare from 65 years to the date of birth, or maybe even to two months before birth to pay for intrauterine surgery. The change would be less costly than it looks at first sight, because the younger group uses, on the average, less medical care than the over-65 Medicare beneficiaries (like me), a group that is becoming an increased fraction of the population.

Nobody in this country should be driven into poverty by a catastrophically expensive illness.