To address the public's need for a "robust debate of health care issues and potential policies", ABC recently aired a prime time town-hall meeting (6/24/09 [1]) on President Barack Obama's health reform proposals. The forum was supposed to feature "questions from every single vantage point," according to ABC host Diane Sawyer.

Yet ABC did not air a single question about single-payer national health insurance--which many healthcare providers and citizens consider the best way to fix the broken healthcare system.

Single-payer national health insurance is a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors). The goal of healthcare reform, we're told, is to expand coverage to the uninsured while lowering costs, and many people consider single-payer to be the most sensible way to achieve these goal.

Polls show that single-payer is supported by 59 percent of the American public (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09 [2]) and 59 percent of physicians (Annals of Internal Medicine, 4/1/08 [2]).

Yet single-payer has been mentioned only four times on ABC News over the past 6 months, three of them by opponents dismissing the idea (3/5/09, 6/14/09, 6/14/09).

A recent FAIR study (3/6/09 [3]) showed that of hundreds of newspaper and broadcast stories on healthcare reform in the week leading up to Obama's March 5 healthcare summit, only five included the views of single-payer advocates; none of those appeared on TV networks.

Let's send a message to ABC and the other TV networks: The insurance lobbies and many politicians don't want to talk about single payer. But that makes it all the more important that the media do.

Sign our petition [4] to ABC, CBS and NBC, demanding that single-payer be a part of their coverage of the health care debate. Add your name [4] to lend your voice to this effort to broaden the debate over the broken U.S. health care system.