Today at 1:15, President Obama will host an online town hall meeting where he will take Americans’ questions about health reform. The event will be live at www.HealthReform.gov.
To participate in the online chat, go to http://apps.facebook.com/whitehouselive/.
Or, if you're in Orlando, you can "rally for meaningful healthcare reform and the right for Floridians to choose a strong public health insurance option" with other like-minded folk at Sen. Bill Nelson's Office, 225 East Robinson St., at 2 today.
To prepare for either, you may want to study some Florida data that indicate a need for action. The state-by-state data, released this week by the Department of Health and Human Services, show that in Florida:
-- Family premiums cost employers and workers an average of $12,780 a year in 2006, or about what a full-time worker at minimum wage would earn. That represented an increase of 88 percent since 2000. Small wonder, then, that the rate of employer coverage declined from 57 percent in 2000 to 54 percent by 2007.
--Premiums contain a hidden “health tax” of about $1,400 to cover the cost of the uninsured.
--More than one in five Florida families spends more than 10 percent of their income on health care.
--The overall quality of care in Florida is rated as “weak.”
