Mission Statement

Public Option Please was founded to champion the cause of making health care a right in the United States. Public Option Please combines grassroots activism with the power of the Internet to promote strategic progressive health care advocacy. Our focus will be on advocacy and shaping the legislative process to achieve this goal.

What We Believe:

• Everyone has the right to guaranteed and affordable health care.
• Health care decisions are between a patient and his or her doctor.
• The cost of health care is going up too much every year, and more and more people just can’t afford it.
• No one in America should ever go broke because they get sick.
• The best way to make sure everyone has health care, while keeping costs down, is the public option.

Board of Directors

Jane Hamsher
Jane Hamsher is the founder and publisher of firedoglake.com, a leading progressive online community and blog that features online reporting and commentary, and weekly Book Salons with such authors as John Dean, Naomi Klein, Matt Taibbi, and Paul Krugman. FDL has also raised millions of dollars for progressive candidates and causes. Jane has written for the Huffington Post, AlterNet, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Forbes, the Guardian and the American Prospect, and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS and the BBC. She is the author of the best-selling book Killer Instinct and has produced such films “Natural Born Killers” and “Permanent Midnight.” She is a 16-year cancer survivor.

Eve Gittelson
Eve Gittelson is a graduate of Barnard College (Columbia University). An outspoken critic of the U.S. health care system and an advocate for wide-ranging health care reform, Eve is the blogger known as nyceve. She writes about health care for a variety of online publications including Guaranteed Healthcare, The Huffington Post, FireDogLake, Stand With Dr. Dean, and Daily Kos. She is a frequent participant on health care reform panels, and lives in Manhattan.

Marcy Wheeler
Marcy Wheeler writes as “emptywheel” at Firedoglake, and is best known for her groundbreaking live-blogging of the Scooter Libby trial. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, which served as a primer of the CIA leak case.  She has also covered efforts to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its illegal warrantless wiretapping and torture programs. Wheeler has a PhD from the University of Michigan and has spoken on blogging and politics at Amherst College, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Duke Law School. A cancer survivor, she was recently awarded the 2009 Hillman Prize for Blog Journalism.