I’m in the middle stages of what, I suppose, is officially called “planning a book tour.” What it feels like is that I email random people and lovely bookstore owners and say, “Hey, I wrote this thing that has some relevance but also some swearing. You don’t know me. Could I come and bother you and invite a bunch of people, all for the purpose of trying to sell my book?” Only, of course, it’s not just about selling a book. It’s about this darn thing that is so important to me that it almost brings tears to my eyes, and to the eyes of lots of other people: healthcare. The need of it. The lack of it. The agonizing fight to get something that now isn’t even a public option. The fact that the kingdom is lost every day for want of a nail, that people are dying and this problem could be solved. So that’s what the book Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir is about. It’s the mystery of healthcare and how we exist without it. I took years of my life and devoted a book to this obsession because I thought writing a book about it would help me figure it out. But none of us have figured it out. So there it is: a story of heartbreak, my own small story as one sliver of a national tragedy that we have resources to fix but that we refuse to. Kudos and beyond kudos to all the activists who have worked so hard on single payer work over the long haul, Physicians for a National Health Plan, and thousands of other groups. And there are still miles to go. So the book is about that, and about how much it sucks to try to put together a crazy quilt of coverage when all you’ve got to work with are scraps of our current smattered, over-privatized, pulverized, profiteered and pirated system. It shouldn’t even be called healthcare. It should be called health could-care-less, if it weren’t for all the dedicated health professionals working to provide healthcare in spite of the fiscal obstacles set up to penalize the poor. Holy smokes, I should stop there. I guess I still have some screed in me about this issue. Anyway, check out the developing book tour dates at Booktour.com and hit me up if it looks like a date would fit with your group and your schedule. I’m also totally into doing fundraisers and/or publicity and membership events for healthcare and single-payer organizations.