Tennessee has 2 Representatives on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health:
Bart Gordon email
Washington Office
2306 Rayburn HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-4231
Fax: (202) 225-6887

Marsha Blackburn email
Washington Office:
217 Cannon Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
202-225-2811
202-225-3004 fax

Lamar Alexander is on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
You can email the committee at help_comments@help.senate.gov
........email Senator Alexander
SD-455 / Washington, DC 20510
Voice: (202) 224-4944
Fax: (202) 228-3398

Tennessee has no current representation on the Senate Finance Committee where the real action is. A list of links to committee members can be found here. This committee is chaired by Max Baucus (D-MT) who is funded heavily by the usual suspects, here. Clicking that link will give a good idea of why Baucus has described discussing a single payer option "a waste of time."
Max Baucus email
511 Hart Senate Office Bldg. (coffee and doughnuts @8:15am every Wednesday the Senate is in session)
Washington, D.C. 20510
(202) 224-2651(Office)
(202) 224-9412 (Fax)

The above info serves as a relevant to TN update to the "Citizen Action Mini-Manual, Part 1: HealthCare" found here.

This Tuesday, May 12, the Senate Finance Subcommittee is holding its final roundtable on healthcare reform. The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee has issued a request to include Roseann Demoro, Executive Director of CNA/NNOC and longtime leader in the single-payer movement. PNHP has formally submitted the names of two outstanding physicians, Drs. Marcia Angell and Steffie Woolhandler, to testify as expert witnesses. Join this All Out Effort here (link...)

The $2trillion in proposed, possible savings is akin to an offer from Comcast to lower your bill after you've threatened to switch to DirectTV. This carrot did little more than rile single-payer advocates who had already compromised by toning down the language of their demands from "single-payer system" to "public option." I keep finding conflicting reports of "on the table/off the table." My expectations were that it would be off the table for now by the end of the Senate Finance Committee public hearing that began at 10am today (link...), and I expected it to show back up once the legislation goes to the two house committees referenced in the above comment. Max Baucus has all along said that he doesn't believe a single payer public option has the votes, but he seems to be at least keeping some options in his hip pocket in case that sentiment starts to swing the other way.

Daily KOs has the story, "Senator Baucus Releases Paper On Public Option!" which seems to be an exclusive scoop as I haven't found any other references to this paper out there yet today.

"Unlike the 2 previous hearings ("roundtables") today's witnesses will represent serious progressive think tanks and advocates ranging from the Urban Institute and Center for Science in the Public Interest to Harvard, MIT, and the Brandeis University Center on Social Policy." -Mark Dorlester

Hopefully, there will be no doctors arrested today. C-SPAN

I'm sure you have friends who only have time to get their news from Fox that think you want to socialize medicine through big government. We know that you don't want English dental care, and we know that you know that's not what the Democrats are pushing in Congress. I have previously mentioned the Frank Luntz memo to Republicans detailing how to "stop the Washington takeover of health care," the memo directly responsible for that sweet looking old lady calling you a commie bastard in the grocery store today. Tom Hayes does a good job of fighting this spin (Duke Medical Center really does have 900 billing clerks for 900 beds), so I'm forwarding this email to you:


continued...

If you want to know how carefully people are trying to control this discussion, look up "free market" at wikipedia. The most recent edit was about 24 hours ago. Then check "socialism" and you'll find it's even more recently edited. How much have the definitions of socialism or free market as an economic term changed just this week? Not much, but knowing how often people check wikipedia makes it an important target for people trying to own the information.

We never attain a perfect free market, it's a theoretical construct along the lines of frictionless atmosphere, but both are tools to help us more readily grasp complex systems.

Presently, both "free market" and "socialized medicine" are terms being used to distract attention from the reality she's described.

Understand, there is nothing that makes a "single-payer" system equivalent to socialized medicine. In fact, it doesn't even have to be administered by the government - but that is being obscured by the drive to ALSO craft a solution that makes it considerably more likely that everybody has access to health care when and as they need it.

Single payer is nothing more sinister than having only one agency or corporate entity responsible for processing all the paperwork. Considerable savings can be achieved this way just by simplifying what hospitals, clinics, and medical practitioners do presently to navigate a system where each insurer has their own forms, rules, and plans, which leads to such travesties as the Duke Medical Center having (literally) one billing clerk per bed.

By most calculations, the savings from streamlining and simplifying the payment processing would literally pay for all the uninsured people in the country to be treated.

If we were talking socialized medicine, you'd lose your choice of which doctor to see - yet there's nothing about that inherent in a single-payer system, it's just cost-savings by reducing the overhead.

If it's that simple, why hasn't business already undertaken the cost savings? Because they have no incentive to do so. They make money as a fraction of the amount they take in. If health care costs rise, they simply increase premiums, and continue to rake in their percentage (now on a higher gross dollar amount - in business terms they win.) If they want to cut costs, it's much easier to raise deductibles, exclude certain treatments or drugs, and drop or deny coverage of the people who are (or would be) using their service the most. Looking at their bottom line, insurers make the most profits when they insure the people who use them the least - so their incentive is to insure the health people, and exclude all the costly ones.

And today it looks like the House will be doing their utmost to get a bill in place before the session ends in August, which will mean things end up in a conference committee...

Which means you really need to write to your Representatives today even if they're not on the key committees. There's a lot of obfuscation going on, but if you follow the money it turns out most of it is based on trying to protect profits. Is Medicare perfect? Of course not, but it operates on very low overhead. If the people in Congress have been able to work out a health insurance system that works for themselves, surely something similar is attainable for the rest of us.

Don't stop now, make sure D.C. knows you care, you're watching, and you're making noise.

Tom Hayes, (not the author of Jump Point)

Also, the President wants your health care story. Go tell it. -EL

Leading health industry groups have brought healthcare to us in its current unaffordable form and Washington’s fiscal management of social programs (SSI & Medicare) has a poor track record at best. Is there a plan “C” and “D”? Affordable healthcare is a necessity but having a federally run conglomerate the medial equivalent of say, TVA or the USPS making health decisions for myself or anyone is the last thing this country needs. There has to be alternatives.