Tell Senator Johnson America Can Do Health Coverage Right: Single-Payer!

My friend Jackie reminds me that Senator Johnson is spending the Congressional holiday recess touring the state to talk health care. She lists three events where we can tell the Senator what we want in person:

1. Sioux Falls, Tuesday, June 30 – Ramkota, Roosevelt Room, 3200 West Maple Street, Panel Presentation from 2-3:30pm.
2. Yankton, Wednesday, July 1 - Best Western Kelly Inn,1607 East Hwy 50, Panel Presentation from 11-12:30pm.
3. Mitchell, Thursday, July 2 – James Valley Community Center, 300 West 1st Avenue, Panel Presentation from 2-3:30pm
   

If you can't make the meetings, Senator Johnson is also taking health care stories online. Need ideas on what to write? Here's what I dashed off to him this weekend:

When our daughter was born at Madison Community Hospital, she had a lung infection that required three nights in NICU in Sioux Falls. The total bill for prenatal, birth, and NICU came to $24,000, of which our high-deductible insurance policy (all we could afford on teacher pay) covered only $12,000 (insurers in pro-life South Dakota aren't required to cover prenatal and maternity). Every bill the insurer sent us after our daughters birth had at least one error that we had to take the time to track down and correct.

The federal government can't do worse than that. Actually, we're convinced the federal government can do better. We need a single-payer system. To pay for it, my family will gladly pay $3,600 more a year in taxes... which is exactly what we pay now for a $7,500-deductible private insurance plan that could disappear the moment one of us suffers cancer or a stroke or some other malady that would make us too unprofitable for our private insurer to continue to cover.

As I said, we are confident the government (all of us, working together, not for profit but for the common good) can do better. Single-payer, not-for-profit health coverage: if other countries can do it, we can do it even better (we are America, aren't we?).

I was hoping that when Senator Johnson came back from his stroke two years ago, he would be inspired to champion giving every American the same great government health coverage that helped him through his hard times. Government health care works for you, Senator Johnson. It can work for all of us. Stand and fight for single-payer, not-for-profit health coverage.