'There is a better health plan, Mr. President' | Press Release
Medicare-for-All doctors available for comment on State of the Union speech
Rising to President Obama's challenge to others in his State of the Union address that they come up with a better approach to health care reform than his own, physicians who advocate for a single-payer program stepped forward this morning to again make the case for their alternative, which they say has solid public support.
Among them is Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician and congressional fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of 17,000 physicians who support a single-payer system, who is traveling to the White House today to deliver an open letter to the president calling on him to meet with her and other Medicare-for-All advocates.
Also speaking out today are Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, co-founders of PNHP, primary care physicians in Cambridge, Mass., and professors at Harvard Medical School, who provided commentary in a blog in today's New York Times.
In her letter to Obama, Flowers notes how surprised she and others were when single-payer advocates were excluded from the early stages of the discussions on health reform. Flowers was one of several physicians, nurses and reform advocates who were arrested at Senate Finance Committee hearings last spring for standing up and asking in a dignified way why the Medicare-for-All option was "off the table."
