Response to $64,000 Question

Hi Dad,

I am very eager to learn more about health care reform, and I would welcome your thoughts or any good information you could send along. There is so much misinformation going around that it is hard to know where to find good facts. This email you forwarded may be perfectly legitimate, but I do have some questions and concerns about it.

Because of all the code surrounding it, it seems this has been forwarded again and again, and I can't tell who originally wrote it. Do you know where it came from originally?

Also, the email mentions an interview on ABC's health care special. I wanted to find the interview, either a transcript or video, so I could understand the exact wording of the question, and the context surrounding Obama's response (or lack of response). The email quotes the interviewer's question asking about "the universal health care program." Although some people are calling Obama's health care reform "nationalization" or "the government takeover of health care", that isn't really what it is. He has said he would like to see universal health care, or a single payer system, eventually, and perhaps the current bill would lead to that, but the current bill is not that. This could be the reason for Obama's failure to answer the question. But I couldn't find a copy of the interview, so I wasn't able to judge for myself what this interaction might have meant.

I looked up the "Kennedy Health Care Bill" mentioned in the email, and although I didn't take too much time to research it thoroughly, the discussion about this particular bill took place in early June. There have been a lot of changes to the proposed reform since then, so the information in this email might be outdated by now.

Lastly, and this may be a picky thing, but I'm a teacher, so I guess these things matter to me: the email was full of typos and misspellings.

I don't know what to think about health care reform, really. I think it is needed, but I don't know what it should look like. The whole issue is so complicated I feel like I need a degree to make an informed decision. But I do want to try to understand what I can, and would be interested in hearing from all sides of the debate with good, well-presented, verifiable information.

Did you have a chance to read the CT article or the McLaren letter I sent earlier?

Mindy