Tired Of Feeling Helpless About Health Reform?

I've outlined ways below in what you can do to change that feeling of helplessness as you watch the mark-up process with the health care reform legislation once it's been introduced in the House of Representatives. We can have a huge effect on the health care reform legislation in Congress and in the White House simply by changing our feeling of helplessness by making positive change happen.

Here's how you can make this positive change happen with health care reform. First, start by becoming familiar with the committee mark-up process, which is what happens after a bill is introduced in Congress. There will be a fast timetable especially with the health care reform legislation, which means we get a very small window of time to make positive change happen.

The health care reform legislation will be introduced on July 14th, and it will likely be posted by one of the three House Committees in charge of the health care reform legislation -- Education and Labor Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee, and the Ways and Means Committee. The bill itself will undergo three different mark-ups by each of these three Committees, which means it'll be an incredibly messy process in which good amendments and bad amendments will be offered to either strengthen or weaken the bill.

Basically, here's what you can do once the bill is introduced and before the mark-up process begins the next day -- call each of these three committees, and ask for the amendments to be posted to the committee website so everyone has a chance to review them in full before knowing which amendments to support and which ones not to support.

This allows us the opportunity to be able to lobby our Members of Congress who are on these committees to support or to vote against a specific amendment. This is what making positive change happen is all about, and we don't have to feel helpless about the process with the health care reform legislation in congress.