Watch. Listen. Never forget.

MoveOn.org is asking that we all light a candle in our windows for Senator Kennedy tonight. Look this way. You will see my candle. Jennifer

Rest in Peace -- We'll Take it From Here

There are so many reasons to mourn the death of Edward M. Kennedy, one of the longest-serving and most effective Senators who ever served our country. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act is one whose presence is felt in my life every single day, as well as in the lives of millions of Americans with disabilities.

I needn't repeat the long obituaries, or catalogue his accomplishments. The press is doing a very good job of that.

No, I sit here in tears this morning because I know that the Lion's life's work was left undone -- and I know that it is up to us to see to it that the Edward M. Kennedy Health Care Reform Act is passed.

There's a lot of speculation about whether we can do it without him. I believe we must do it FOR him. He gave us the dream of a day when no person would be in pain because they were denied care, when no person would be too sick to be a good enough risk to insure. Despite his advantages, he somehow knew what it was like to be on the bottom of the heap, and he dedicated himself to raising up those who could not rise alone.

So today, in honor of Edward M. Kennedy, I re-commit myself to doing all I can to make his dream come true. After all, his whole life was about fulfilling our dreams. It seems the least we can do. Jennifer

LIES

I received this email today -- I'm also recording my responses: To Jennifer C. Jaff, Esq. I disagree with your statement about the "lies" in regard to the healthcare bill. Please explain the following: P.50 Section 152 "HC will be provided to all non-US citizens." Response: The word "citizen" doesn't appear on page 50. Section 152 is about nondiscrimination in health plans. In fact, the plan does cover LEGAL immigrants, but not ILLEGAL immigrants. P. 85 Line 7 "Specs for Benefit levels for plans" Isn't this rationing? Response: These are minimum levels of health plans, not rationing. Plans can provide basic, enhanced, and premium packages. This isn't a heath care bill, but a bill for the gov't to control. For example P. 59 Lines 21-24 "Government will have direct access to your banks accounts for electronic funds transfer." Response: This is direct deposit if you want it, not government access to your bank account. Do you use direct deposit for your paycheck? Or pay bills online? Does that give your employer or vendors access to your bank account? and P. 195 "Officers & employees of HC Administration will have acess to all Americans' financial and personal records." Response: This is government access to your tax returns, which they already have. And P. 425 Lines 15-24; P.429 Lines 1-25 certainly sound like the government deciding "end of life." Response: This allows doctors whom you consult about your end of life care to be reimbursed by Medicare.

All lies. I understand that not everybody can read the l000 page legislation for themselves, but to just buy this nonsense? I bet the person who emailed me about this is still not going to buy my responses. What will it take to stop these lies from circulating?

Jennifer

Do Unto Others . . . .

Taped to the frame of my computer monitor is a quotation that helps me every day to remember why I am working so hard for the rights of people with chronic illnesses: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." Martin Luther King, Jr.

This, from a man who knew inequality and injustice when he saw it.

I watch the debates over health insurance reform and wonder. Why is it that we have to pitch its advantages to the people who already have insurance because otherwise, they will oppose reform to help the uninsured? Why is it that seniors are lining up in opposition to reform because they are afraid that -- although the draft legislation does not include cuts to Medicare -- they will lose out? Why is it that President Obama was critiqued for telling faith-based groups this week that health care reform is our moral responsibility?

When Social Security was passed, and then Medicare, they received strong bipartisan support. There was a need. We as a country did not want the elderly and disabled to be without income and health care. We would all make the sacrifice, we decided as a nation. And we do the same for veterans, whether they saw combat or not. Indeed, we provide free health care for all prisoners, regardless of what they did to land themselves in a federal penitentiary.

So why isn't it enough to say health insurance reform simply is the right thing to do? There are 46 million people in the United States with no health care. Some of them choose not to buy insurance -- they are young and healthy, and not thinking about the what ifs that we who are older and wiser know will become a reality for many of them, especially if you consider that half of all Americans have a chronic health condition. But many of them either cannot afford insurance or they have pre-existing conditions that make it impossible to find insurance. Why is it okay to leave them to fend for themselves?

Is this the kind of country we want to be -- one that is inhabited by people who make their decisions about what policies and programs are important based solely on what is best for them and them alone?

The person in agony, turned away by insurers because of a pre-existing condition, given pain meds and shown the door by the hospital emergency room, left with nowhere to go, nobody to help them -- I talk to people like these every day. There are no solutions for them. They have been left to fend for themselves, and they cannot. They are living on the street, in their car, in shelters where they can't sleep for fear of their few meager possessions being stolen by others. No medicine, no doctors, no family, no friends, no support.

There but for the grace of whomever/whatever go we all. If you think it can't happen to you, think again. All it takes is one catastrophic bout of illness and you lose your job, your health insurance, your home -- it is happening to people every single day. You could be one of the unlucky ones tomorrow, no matter what your status is today.

But I don't want to have to sell health insurance reform to you by appealing to your self-interest. I want you to think about what America means, who Americans are. I want all of us to recognize that, "of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." And it must stop. Now.

If you care about equality, dignity, community, respect, you must be in favor of health insurance reform. Jennifer

Loss . . . and Loss

It turns out not all loss is so bad.

For example, I promised you months ago that I was going to go on a diet and lose weight. If I'm going to set an example for others with chronic illness, I have to live a healthier lifestyle, and for me, that starts with food -- what I eat and how much. What I can eat is very limited by my Crohn's disease, gastroparesis, and lactose intolerance. I went to a nutritionist recently who told me to eat several small meals per day, and address sugar cravings with unsweetened apple sauce. If I eat all day, I'm in the bathroom all day -- and anybody who's ever had a sugar craving knows that unsweetened apple sauce is no solution! But I've cut way back on the sugar, and I'm trying to add cooked veggies and yogurt (soy) and, yes, apple sauce to my diet. Three pounds so far this week -- and with all the barium I drank yesterday (I had an MR enterography, and anybody who tells you it's just like an MRI is lying!!!), I'm content with that as a start. I know I'm going to make it. When have I not kept a promise to you?

But sometimes loss just plain sucks. We've been working since day one with an organization that represents lots of patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. It's been a great relationship. For a small monthly fee, not only have we provided services to their members, but we've worked with them on public policy issues, and I've traveled the country speaking to their members. It's never been a whole lot of money, but it's been income we've counted on -- and in this economy, any loss of income is scary -- but it's been a relationship that mattered a lot to us, to me. Apparently, it didn't matter as much to them. They had to make some brutal budget cuts, and we ended up in the cut pile. It makes me very sad. It's an organization of which I've been a member for 35 years, to which my family has given many thousands of dollars, and in which I've invested a lot of energy and heart. Losing that relationship is a mourning process. As an organization, with the help of people like Pearl Jam's Mike McCready and his amazing wife Ashley, as well as a handful of others who have been steadfast supporters of Advocacy for Patients, I suspect we'll survive. But it's terribly sad.

The real risk, though, is that one loss will undermine the other. My first reaction when I'm feeling sad and lost is to eat a bag of jelly beans! And that cannot happen. I'm holding onto the good loss regardless of the bad.

And life goes on, the good with the bad. Jennifer

Why I Support a Public Option

Finally, the health insurance reform debate has graduated from fictitious death panels to something that really matters: Should we have a public option that can compete with the public plan? I think so.

One of the massive problems we face are escalating health insurance premium. Ours went from $450 four years ago to $1000 now. That's per person per month. We can't afford premiums that double every four years. That's as big a reason to reform the system as any.

A public plan would have lower administrative costs because it wouldn't pay fat cat bonuses, and it wouldn't spend so much time trying to figure out what care it could deny. We know this from the Medicare experience.

Co-ops don't get us there, I think. Just setting up health care coops -- groups that form a nonprofit to provide care within a network of doctors, hospitals, etc. -- is too difficult, too cumbersome, and is likely to trap people in small networks. Those of us who need to see a doctor outside of the coop will be out of luck. Coops won't really compete with private insurance because they will be unattractive to most people.

Bob Herbert in today's NY Times is right when he says there's a problem when the health insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers are happy with the reform we're headed towards. No way to force down insurance costs, no way to negotiate drug discounts for Medicare -- they're getting off scott free, to continue to do what they've been doing all along -- milking the system without having to change their ways one bit.

Indeed, health insurers will get millions of healthy individuals who are required to enroll, while not giving up a single thing.

A public option changes this dynamic. It is the only way consumers can really win. It will drive down the cost of premiums so the private plans can compete with the public plans. There's simply no other way to get there.

If you agree, please speak up. Jennifer

The President Speaks

August 16, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor

Why We Need Health Care Reform

By BARACK OBAMA

OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.

These are people like Lori Hitchcock, whom I met in New Hampshire last week. Lori is currently self-employed and trying to start a business, but because she has hepatitis C, she cannot find an insurance company that will cover her. Another woman testified that an insurance company would not cover illnesses related to her internal organs because of an accident she had when she was 5 years old. A man lost his health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because the insurance company discovered that he had gallstones, which he hadn’t known about when he applied for his policy. Because his treatment was delayed, he died.

I hear more and more stories like these every single day, and it is why we are acting so urgently to pass health-insurance reform this year. I don’t have to explain to the nearly 46 million Americans who don’t have health insurance how important this is. But it’s just as important for Americans who do have health insurance.

There are four main ways the reform we’re proposing will provide more stability and security to every American.

First, if you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of high-quality, affordable coverage for yourself and your family — coverage that will stay with you whether you move, change your job or lose your job.

Second, reform will finally bring skyrocketing health care costs under control, which will mean real savings for families, businesses and our government. We’ll cut hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies that do nothing to improve care and everything to improve their profits.

Third, by making Medicare more efficient, we’ll be able to ensure that more tax dollars go directly to caring for seniors instead of enriching insurance companies. This will not only help provide today’s seniors with the benefits they’ve been promised; it will also ensure the long-term health of Medicare for tomorrow’s seniors. And our reforms will also reduce the amount our seniors pay for their prescription drugs.

Lastly, reform will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable. A 2007 national survey actually shows that insurance companies discriminated against more than 12 million Americans in the previous three years because they had a pre-existing illness or condition. The companies either refused to cover the person, refused to cover a specific illness or condition or charged a higher premium.

We will put an end to these practices. Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick.

Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. It makes sense, it saves lives and it can also save money.

This is what reform is about. If you don’t have health insurance, you will finally have quality, affordable options once we pass reform. If you have health insurance, we will make sure that no insurance company or government bureaucrat gets between you and the care you need. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. You will not be waiting in any lines. This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance. I don’t believe anyone should be in charge of your health care decisions but you and your doctor — not government bureaucrats, not insurance companies.

The long and vigorous debate about health care that’s been taking place over the past few months is a good thing. It’s what America’s all about.

But let’s make sure that we talk with one another, and not over one another. We are bound to disagree, but let’s disagree over issues that are real, and not wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that anyone has actually proposed. This is a complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate.

Despite what we’ve seen on television, I believe that serious debate is taking place at kitchen tables all across America. In the past few years, I’ve received countless letters and questions about health care. Some people are in favor of reform, and others have concerns. But almost everyone understands that something must be done. Almost everyone knows that we must start holding insurance companies accountable and give Americans a greater sense of stability and security when it comes to their health care.

I am confident that when all is said and done, we can forge the consensus we need to achieve this goal. We are already closer to achieving health-insurance reform than we have ever been. We have the American Nurses Association and the American Medical Association on board, because our nation’s nurses and doctors know firsthand how badly we need reform. We have broad agreement in Congress on about 80 percent of what we’re trying to do. And we have an agreement from the drug companies to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors. The AARP supports this policy, and agrees with us that reform must happen this year.

In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain. But for all the scare tactics out there, what’s truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing. If we maintain the status quo, we will continue to see 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day. Premiums will continue to skyrocket. Our deficit will continue to grow. And insurance companies will continue to profit by discriminating against sick people.

That is not a future I want for my children, or for yours. And that is not a future I want for the United States of America.

In the end, this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives and livelihoods. This is about people’s businesses. This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we made the changes we needed, and gave our children a better life. I believe we can, and I believe we will.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States.