Sample Letter to Legislators 2
Representative Jane Doe
US House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Congressman Doe:
Now that Democrats control Congress, the time is ripe for our four Long Island Democratic representatives to rally round a comprehensive solution for America’s failed, fragmented, irrational, cruel, wasteful, and costly health care system.
While the elderly and the disabled are covered by popular Medicare and the poor have Medicaid, most working families must rely on the shrinking value of employer-based private health insurance or they are among the 46.6 million who have no health insurance at all. This disarray persists even as we spend more than two trillion dollars a year on health care, two to three times per capita of any other country.
The President and a few states would address the problem with tax deductions for individuals who buy expensive private insurance. The administration admits these plans would only help 6% of the uninsured, mostly the rich, and would perpetuate the high administrative costs of private insurance- about ten times that of Medicare- and its enduring obligation to put corporate profit ahead of patient care.
Currently, unions worry about the affordability of adequate coverage and business struggles with the soaring costs of coverage while foreign competition, mostly countries with national health insurance, is totally free of that expense.
The comprehensive solution we urge you to now support is HR 676, the Conyers Medicare For All Bill. Huge savings would accrue from drastically simplified administration plus the proven efficiency of a universal risk pool. In the last Congress, 80 Democrats resisted well-financed opposition of the insurance industry and signed on as cosponsors of HR 676. Please let us know you are now ready to join them, or, if not, why not. We look forward to your response on this most pressing domestic issue.
Of all the forms of inequality ,injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Martin Luther King, 1966
Sincerely,
Your Name
A special thanks to Dr. Jim Bernstein for sending this letter to four Long Island Congresspeople