Last year, Ralph Nader ran for President.
I was Ralph's national campaign coordinator.
During the campaign, Ralph called it as he saw it.
DC was a corporate prison.
The Democrats and Republicans were beholden to corporate America.
The corporate Obama we saw on the campaign trail in 2008 wouldn't be much different just because he became President Obama and moved into the White House in 2009.
As usual, Ralph was right.
Exhibit A: Health insurance.
Today, fifty million Americans are uninsured.
According to the Institute of Medicine, 22,000 Americans die every year from a lack of health insurance.
Obama knows that a Canadian style single payer national health insurance system - everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctors and hospitals - will bring these numbers down to zero.
Zero people are uninsured in Canada.
Zero people die every year in Canada due to lack of health insurance.
Yet, during the 2008 campaign, Obama took single payer off the table.
It's still off the table in the corporate prison that is Washington, D.C.
This despite the fact that, according to the most recent polls, the majority of Americans, doctors, nurses, health economists and even small businesses want single payer.
Even a young Obama wanted single payer.
Before he became the politician that he is today.
Obama still knows what the answer is - single payer.
Yet he bows down before the ever powerful for-profit health and drug insurance industries.
That's just the seedy reality inside the beltway today.
The burning question outside is:
What are we going to do about it?
And the answer is:
We are going to deliver single payer for the American people.
To get the job done, we have launched - Single Payer Action.
Over the past couple of months, Single Payer Action has been out for a test drive.
We've been kicking the tires.
And things are looking good.
Single Payer Action exposed PBS Frontline for deliberately tilting its documentary "Sick Across America" to reflect an insurance industry bias.
The one-hour documentary never once mentioned single payer.
Single Payer Action activists burned their insurance bills outside a meeting of the health insurance industry's main lobbying group in Washington, D.C.
I was Ralph's national campaign coordinator.
During the campaign, Ralph called it as he saw it.
DC was a corporate prison.
The Democrats and Republicans were beholden to corporate America.
The corporate Obama we saw on the campaign trail in 2008 wouldn't be much different just because he became President Obama and moved into the White House in 2009.
As usual, Ralph was right.
Exhibit A: Health insurance.
Today, fifty million Americans are uninsured.
According to the Institute of Medicine, 22,000 Americans die every year from a lack of health insurance.
Obama knows that a Canadian style single payer national health insurance system - everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctors and hospitals - will bring these numbers down to zero.
Zero people are uninsured in Canada.
Zero people die every year in Canada due to lack of health insurance.
Yet, during the 2008 campaign, Obama took single payer off the table.
It's still off the table in the corporate prison that is Washington, D.C.
This despite the fact that, according to the most recent polls, the majority of Americans, doctors, nurses, health economists and even small businesses want single payer.
Even a young Obama wanted single payer.
Before he became the politician that he is today.
Obama still knows what the answer is - single payer.
Yet he bows down before the ever powerful for-profit health and drug insurance industries.
That's just the seedy reality inside the beltway today.
The burning question outside is:
What are we going to do about it?
And the answer is:
We are going to deliver single payer for the American people.
To get the job done, we have launched - Single Payer Action.
Over the past couple of months, Single Payer Action has been out for a test drive.
We've been kicking the tires.
And things are looking good.
Single Payer Action exposed PBS Frontline for deliberately tilting its documentary "Sick Across America" to reflect an insurance industry bias.
The one-hour documentary never once mentioned single payer.
Single Payer Action activists burned their insurance bills outside a meeting of the health insurance industry's main lobbying group in Washington, D.C.
Single Payer Action blew open the story about how Obama tried to bar single payer advocates from the White House health care summit last month.
As a result of that reporting, Obama was forced to admit two single payer advocates inside the White House gates for the summit.
And in West Virginia last month, a group of Single Payer Action belly dancers drew widespread attention when they shook it up for single payer at the Martinsburg offices of Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV).
Last year, after the campaign, we wrote to you promising action on single payer.
Action time has arrived.
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