A vote against single payer or at least the public option is a vote

[JDPriestly]

for a Republican majority in Congress in 2010. Send that message to your Congressmember.

I suggest that we all target Senator Max Baucus and remind him point blank that we will not have a Democratic majority and he will not be chair of his committee unless there either single payer or a public option health insurance reform is passed by Congress. He needs to back the public option and get out there and sell it in Montana. His political goose is cooked as are all the political geese of Democrats in Congress if he does not back Obama on this one.

It makes Obama and the Democrats look weak when they can't get behind this one policy that is so clearly in the interest of the American people.

Make sure that your older friends and family members watch Obama's AARP/CNN press conference of this morning. He answered the questions on the minds of senior citizens and spoke to the fears of the older generation. This is really important.

Take action on this right now. Inundate Senator Baucus's office with e-mails and phone calls letting him know that he will lose his chairmanship if Republicans regain the majority in the Senate and that is what will happen if he does not back Obama on the public option.

[Freddie Stubbs]

1. The unemployment rate will be the biggest factor in the 2010 election

[damntexdem]

2. Actually, I won't.

Since my congresscritter is a horrible Republican.

[frazzled]

3. Um, there is no vote on single payer

I don't usually respond to these types of threads about single payer, because I just don't understand them. Like so many, I believe a single payer system would be best in an ideal world. But I am realistic enough to deduce that if we are having tons of trouble even getting the kind of modest reform that is being proposed, there wouldn't be a chance in aitch-ee-double-toothpicks a single-payer bill would ever even make it out of a single committee. What is it that people just don't get about that?

I feel it's rather mendacious to keep pushing single payer when you know it isn't remotely possible. Let's get a strong public option in now, which will pave the way for the gradual sidelining of the insurance industry ... at which point pushing for single-payer will make lots of sense.

[JDPriestly]

4. When you negotiate a deal, you have to ask for more than you expect

to get. Let's say you want to settle a lawsuit, you ask for the maximum -- above what you think you could possibly get -- and you keep fighting until you get as far above your minimum as possible. You have to ask for the maximum.

Eventually, we need to have single payer. The insurance companies give us nothing for the money we give them. We would get better medical care if we just had an insurance exchange managed by the government that figured how much money the pool of insureds would need to put in in order to provide the care needed for each member. The insurance exchange would simply process the money and coordinate payment to providers.

[JDPriestly]

5. Actually, my representative is a co-sponsor of H.R. 676 which I

consider to be single payer.