Originally emailed to Senator Bill Nelson, D-FL:
You hit on the most vexing issue of this entire bill and that is cost reform. I would never have voted an entire redistribution of the people's wealth to insurance companies and bureaucrats only to find that nothing has been done to control the cost of key items like the entire production of the pharmaceutical industry. This massive law is doomed to fail and doomed to bankrupt the United States and all other programs with it if it is not repealed. I don't in fact think it will be (my opinion of government has fallen that low), but the least we can ask is to re-fix this monster to remove the Constitutional violations against the Commerce Clause and the Tenth Amendment -- Bill McCollum has described them accurately in my view -- and to bring the entire investigational weight of Congress to bear on how costs in this system can be reduced -- after all cost is virtually the entire reason the health care system is in the mess that it is, not access.
I can walk into a clinic or a hospital tomorrow and get access. At least until the months-long waiting periods start under this quasi-pseudo-socialist plan. The problem is how much everything COSTS and all the Congress has done is transfer these heavy costs to us regular working people, force us all to buy expensive care for everyone else including illegal immigrants (due to insufficient safeguards and exemption from having to pay in), destroy our privacy and a good measure of our freedom of choice, and raid other programs already in trouble financially to buoy this thing up. And all in a time of recession where attempts to increase tax revenues and exact premiums will only result in diminishing returns and economic disaster.
I don't know what you Democrats plan to do until November 2010, but unless you take some big steps toward resolving the enormous present and future problems your party has created in the past year, your party will enjoy neither my vote, nor, I suspect, the votes of millions and millions of other people who understand what balancing a budget, ordering priorities, and accounting for Murphy's Law are all about.