Whose Humility?

Thank you for acknowledging my email to you. I must say, the form of your acknowledgement seemed to be missing any response specific to the concerns I raised in my first contacting you. Doubly troubling is the way in which your reply fails to do anything more than protect your current partisan position on the matter of health care reform in America. I assume you have many replies to generate in a day so it makes sense that you would use a form letter. Perhaps you were listening last night when yours and my president spoke to the very points your response to me includes. I hope your next letter reflects the President's specific answers to some of the very concerns you present in your reply to me.

Because I take my role as a citizen seriously I even read your form letters and I am not willing to leave your claims unclear or unchallenged by facts I know and the questions I continue to have.

For instance, in what way did you "urge [your] colleagues to take [y]our time and debate all of the issues and proposals so that the American people can follow and understand the development and discussion of the legislation?" It seems to me that when you characterize a public option as dangerous to the point of destroying the private insurance market when it would be serving less than 10% of the population you are not helping the American people understand the legislation. Also, when you portray a public option as trying to "determine the coverage it feels is appropriate for you, choose the doctors that you see, and dictate the care that you receive," you are not helping the American people to understand that private insurers already do exactly that, after charging some employers and sometimes individuals more than 25% of their total income and benefits package.

So I'm bothered that you do not seem to take your own criticisms of our President to heart. Maybe its hard for you seek humility and to see yourself as beholden to all of the citizens of your state as opposed to the corporations or wealthy neighborhoods that provide you more of the funding you receive to insure your incumbency. For instance, how many of the residents in Atlanta's 30327 area code have ever been without medical insurance or worse been without care because their insurer wouldn't cover the cost of a doctor prescribed procedure? Ask Ken Blackwell, he's on the board of your largest institutional contributer, Club for Growth, has he ever been without medical coverage since his football scholarship days at Xavier?

In short, Senator Chambliss, you seem to be out of touch with your constituents. You seem to be out of touch with the specifics of the health care reform debate. You seem to be more interested in satisfying your contributers and not ALL the citizens of GA. Are you also so out of touch that you don't realize that the very insurance covering your medical costs as a member of the Senate is the model for the "public option?"

Please sir, stop protecting your Republican, gentrified, partisan talking points and get in touch with the people of your state. And please stop misrepresenting the state of the current debate on health-are reform in America.