Mr. President:

Your administration has solicited my support for your three principles of healthcare reform. These points are worthy enough, as far as they go, but they do not go far enough.

We are confronted by an industry that by its own commission allows Americans to die in order to enhance the personal wealth of its stakeholders. If this were an operation being conducted by a foreign power, we would consider ourselves to be in a state of war. As it is, it is a condition that cries out to be criminalized.

This industry has demonstrated its low regard for the welfare of Americans by servicing its rapacious lust for money, while denying its ratepayers the services that they contracted to have covered. This industry, by its own policies, is lowering the American standard of living by forcing Americans to accept less and less at a cost of more and more.

The industry forces the cost of medical care to rise by increasing its premiums to doctors for malpractice insurance, and uses that increase as justification for increasing premiums to heath insurance customers, then goes to extraordinary and dishonest lengths to avoid paying claims on either. These increases have no basis in claim experience. They are simply justified by a self-serving upward spiral generated by the insurance companies themselves.

Your administration and the Congress seem to be approaching this issue with an eye to providing scant relief to the American People when the least acceptable solution demands that a remedy be provided. There is an insultingly clear to observe obeisance, indeed, a Pavlovian response, displayed by members of our own party who are stumbling all over themselves to bow at the altar of industry money.

The industry itself alternately offers bribes of campaign contributions to our representatives and threats of those bribes to our representatives' electoral opponents. It propagandizes that private, for profit health insurance is superior to anything that the government could offer, while the facts stand against those claims and they bend every effort without regard to ethics to kill the government options in their crib. They do so because those options represent what really turns their bowels to liquid, and that is real competition.

This issue has become much more than a legislative initiative. It has become a line of demarcation. The People of the United States with their interests and aspirations for their society stand on one side of that line. The Insurance/Pharma/Medical industry with its sociopathic lust for pelf and decided aversion to ethical behavior stands on the other side.

Our representatives must now choose who they will stand with, understanding that the line cannot be straddled, but must be manned on one or the other side.

I feel a certainty that those who choose to stand against the People will discover to their post-career regret how hollow were the blandishments, bribes and threats of the industry that now stands against us.

The best option at this time is a government administered, single payer plan. There are enough such plans in the industrialized world to offer examples for study, modification and implementation. That it will damage the health insurance industry is not a valid consideration. The People of the United States are to be served in this effort.

Any option that has a private insurance industry included must mandate by statute that such an industry must operate as not-for-profit companies. The malpractice insurers and hospitals must be similarly mandated.

Just less than thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan asked what harm it could do to allow these companies a little profit for their efforts. A superficial survey of the state of medical care in the United States is sufficient to answer that question with an indication of how to repair the damage. We must repair that damage now

Sincerely,