Media Alert! Jim Babka will appear on the Liberty Roundtable tomorrow morning. See the Postscript for details.
Quote of the Day: “Here’s something that has gotten lost in the drive to institute universal health insurance: Health insurance doesn’t automatically lead to health care. And with more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans, there is no guarantee that you will be able to see a physician no matter what coverage you have.” — Dr. March Siegel, writing in the Wall Street Journal
Subject: Would you have a lot to say, if you had dinner with your Congressional employees?
Some DC Downsizers think they should only send their Congressional employees one message on a given issue during any one week or month. But . . .
If you had a chance to meet with your Congressional delegation in person would you really confine yourself to just one statement or argument per issue? Of course not. So here’s what we think . . .
Every new fact or argument is also a new opportunity to send another message. You can’t give your Congressional employees all your arguments at once, like you could if you had dinner with them. So you must do it in bits and pieces. And this approach has one advantage a dinner wouldn’t . . .
The dinner would be a one-time event, easily forgotten. But a steady rain of messages is a constant reminder of what you want and how deeply you care about it. Believe me, intense, repeated concern gets communicated upstream from the staff to the big bosses. And right now . . .
A lot of intense, repeated concern needs to be expressed about the health care issue. Here’s the latest, courtesy of Dr. March Siegel, writing in the Wall Street Journal . . .
While politicians are scheming to expand the number of people who have health insurance, from either the government or private companies, doctors are deciding in droves to . . .
* Prefer cash patients
* See no new patients at all
* Reject patients who have either Medicare, Medicaid, or even private coverage
For instance . . .
* A 2008 survey by the Texas Medical Association found that only 38% of primary-care doctors in Texas took new Medicare patients.
* And a 2005 Community Tracking Physician survey showed that only 50% of physicians are accepting Medicaid patients.
This is happening because the politicians have corrupted the nature of health insurance. It cannot be said often enough, insurance is supposed to cover unlikely but expensive problems, not the medical equivalent of oil changes. We have too much so-called insurance, and not enough real insurance.
This is entirely because of various government policies, from tax laws to legal mandates about what insurance must cover, including the supposedly secure coverage Medicare and Medicaid are supposed to provide, but don’t.
The political mania for expanding a corrupted form of health insurance has created a situation where doctors no longer work for their patients. Instead, they work for insurance companies and the government. This is causing a huge chunk of the medical profession to go on strike!
Please understand this — universal (corrupted) health insurance will lead to a universal lack of doctors! This is already happening!
The song remains the same — we need less government involvement in health care and health insurance, not more. Downsize DC!
Tell your Congressional employees to reduce their meddling in health care. Use your personal comments to mention the studies in the bullet points above. You can just cut and paste from this Dispatch if you want.
If you’ve used our Educate the Powerful System before, do the following . . .
* Go to the DownsizeDC.org home page
* Log-in using the log-in button at the right of the navigation bar near the top of the page
* Scroll down and click on the link for campaign number 16. Federal Health Care Monopoly . . . First Do No Harm (Here’s the direct link)
* Scroll down to the form at the bottom of the page and send your message
If you’re sending your very FIRST message to Congress using our system, click on this link, scroll down to the form, fill it out, and send your message.
Forward this message to your friends and ask them to join Downsize DC by sending their own message to Congress.
Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC Army.
Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
P.S. DownsizeDC.org President Jim Babka will be on Liberty Roundtable, with Sam Bushman & Friends, just after 10 AM Eastern (9 AM Central, 8 AM Mountain, 7 AM Pacific) on Tuesday morning (April 21). The show is heard on several stations, but the best way to listen is online at http://www.accentradionetwork.com/chooseplayer.htm