Our Feinstein 1200 Envoy to DC Delivers the Goods!

One of our Feinstein 1200 was in DC to visit family the weekend of September 18 (Rosh Hashanah), and generously offered to deliver a Feinstein 1200 letter to the Senator's office. As I never post names without first asking, I'll refer to this person only as Selfless and Heroic Envoy, because they actually made time to do this during a busy holiday/family visit.

Here is our envoy's abbreviated report:

"Eva,

...I found Feinsteins office on the third floor, they have 3 nice young folks working reception in a small anteroom and that's as far as I got. From that point there was a closed door and lots of busy suits hustling in and out. I handed one of the young receptionists the Feinstein 1200 letter and spent about a half an hour reciting the litany of health insurance dysfunction from my vantage point running a family practice medical group.... I wrapped it up saying that without a robust public option I didn't see any reason to have hope for any significant change in the problems. He said that Feinstein had met with the White House and was much happier with the public option. The gist of his comments were she was much happier with the public option but he didn't actually say she was supporting it....

I'm glad that I went, mostly I thought the receptionists jobs was to act sympathetic and take notes that are probably recycled as soon as I left the room. But who knows at least your letter made it into the office and maybe one little point I made will sneak past the closed door to the real office and land on someones desk."

Let's give deep thanks to our friend. I include the letter delivered by our envoy below:

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Thank you for accepting this letter from our envoy, who generously offered to visit your office while in Washington, D.C.

Our organization represents the 1200+ physicians, nurses, scientists, small businessmen and other constituents of yours who gathered in your San Francisco office the week of August 10, 2009 to support the public option and/or single payer.

As you well know by now, we are deeply disappointed with your failure to support in any significant manner a robust public option, which is the most practical and achievable tool proposed by the House to control insurance premiums and provide affordable health insurance to millions of uncovered Americans.

We are also disappointed that your office refused our many entreaties to meet with you personally while you were in California during the August recess. And that neither you nor your San Francisco office saw fit to respond to the invitation to our Physician-Economist Seminar, held on Monday, September 14, 2009.

Our September 14 seminar featured award-winning UCSF physicians and UC Berkeley economists on the savings that would accrue from the public option and single payer systems. The information provided by the panel, which included a former Senior Economic Advisor to the Bush administration, was both high-level and timely. The event had excellent attendance, and the highly educated audience, which included many primary care physicians, stayed for a full three hours to hear all the panelists speak. At the very least, your staffers, who had been invited, should have attended – but they failed to even RSVP for you or for themselves.

We have read your last official press release on health care reform. In this press release, you note the essential role of the public option to rein in insurance premiums, but you weaken that support drastically by stating your interest in exploring other means of reform, such as cooperatives, which have already proven to be ineffective.

As your constituents, we urge you to bear in mind that any alternative to the public option must demonstrate that it can control costs as effectively as a robust public option, as outlined in HR 3200. To date, the only method proven to control costs more effectively is a single payer system, which you have not supported.

We would also like to point out a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which shows that 63% of U.S. physicians support the public option. An additional 10% of doctors support an entirely public health care system.

Combining these metrics means that three out of four U.S. physicians support much stronger health care reform than you have actively supported.

We regret to inform you that your failure to support the public option in any meaningful way throws into question our decades-long support for your leadership. Moreover, your repeated dismissal of our concerns, including but not limited to the mass misfiling of our pro-health-care-reform letters as anti-health-care-reform letters – an “error” to which your staff repeatedly admitted during the week of August 10, 2009, blaming a “computer glitch”, shows a high level of disregard for your constituents.

We once again welcome you to meet with us when you are next in California.