Jackson County Democrats

Start:
End:

TAKE ACTION

America needs A PUBLIC Health Care OPTION NOW!

Call Senator Wyden on Thursday, May 28^th using our toll free-number 1-888-436-8427. This number operates 24 hours a day- seven days a week.  You will reach the Capitol Switchboard and ask for Senator Wyden’s office.  His office has voice mail 24 hours/day so people can call any time.  If his voice mail box is full, here are alternate numbers:

Portland Office: 503-326-7525.

Medford Office:  858-5122

Eugene Office:  431-0229

Bend Office:  330-9142

Our message is simple:  "I oppose the healthcare trigger. We need the choice of a public healthcare option now, not more of the same broken healthcare system for years to come."

Or use our easy, click-to-call system right now:

Click here to call your Senator and tell them the health care crisis is here now, and that we can't afford to wait for trigger for the public health insurance option.

Oregon Senator Wyden (D) has been working to build support – especially among Republican members – for his own proposal, which would tax employer-provided benefits and create a weak, last-resort public option.  The Wyden proposal would establish a market-based “trigger” for the creation of a public plan (a plan would only be triggered by a dysfunctional and uncompetitive market).  This would reduce the public health insurance option from a national plan with the capacity to make big improvements in how we deliver care to a series of fledgling state plans, developed in isolation and only when a state’s insurance market is in desperate shape. Wyden and Finance Committee Republicans, of course, are backing a bad policy – the system is broken nationwide, with 94 percent of markets in the United States already considered “anti-competitive” by objective DOJ standards.

 However, the “trigger” proposal allows members to vote for a public option that will either never be created, or be created only under adverse conditions (on a state-by-state basis) that would increase the likelihood of its failure. 

The trigger option has legs of its own, beyond the Wyden bill.  Senator Snowe, for example, a key moderate Republican, has referred to the trigger as a “fall-back public plan.”

We simply cannot allow a public option with a trigger to make it out of committee.  We need to make it clear that a reform bill with a public option that’s held back by a trigger is not a reform bill it all.  It’s simply a way to capitulate to the politics of the day and squander the historical opportunity to make a lasting difference.