I've been a salesman my whole life, like my father and his father before him. Started out selling Christmas cards in August at the age of 8 from an ad I saw in a comic book on miserably hot summer days in my Sunday best so I could buy a cheesy drum set which I never learned how to play. Housewives thought I was cute and invited me in after I recited my speech and gave me lemonade while they poured over my catalog and picked out sparkly cards with wintry scenes, the baby Jesus, or snowmen on them for $2.50 per 50 cards.  

I know congressmen and senators must have a little salesmen in them too. Selling themselves to voters at election time is part of the job. So why aren't they selling HR 3200? Instead of focusing on and carping about stupid  Republican criticisms (it's socialism! death panels!) they should concentrate on what the bill actually does.

The way HR 3200 works:
 

• Health Insurance: It promotes real free markets and does away with the government protected rackets we have now. Insurance companies will have to compete in the exchange with each other and the public plan instead of the virtual monopolies they are in most states today. Insurance companies will have access to 50 million new customers who aren't insured today. Their operating costs will be lower because a lot the denial of care bureaucracy they have now won't be necessary because those practices will in fact be illegal.They can transfer a lot of those actuaries everybody hates into sales jobs where they can make people happy selling better cheaper insurance.
  

• Drugs: Whether through rebates like the Baucus/Obamo plan or direct government negotiation we save money. $80 billion over 10 years in the former or as Waxman and Pelosi say $120 to $140 billion by direct government negotiation.If you have a Republican House rep tell him to reject the Baucus/Obama $80 billion deal with the drug companies.Republicans love opposing anything Obama does. So ask him to support direct government negotiations of drug prices with big pharma. Canadians get much better prices than we do by doing that and they only have 30 million strong buying power. We have 330 million people. It'll cost the taxpayer, insurance companies and the consumer of the drugs much less that way. Seniors will applaud you.
  

• Electronic records: This is a no brainer. Even Newt Gingrich says Fed Ex keeps better track of packages than we do of health care records. He and Hillary agreed on a one page standardized form to fill out a few years ago. The VA's VistA open source record keeping system is the best in the world. They've been perfecting it since 1972. It's used by HI and WVA for their public hospitals and Germany, Finland, India, Malaysia and Jordan have adopted it. 4 or 5 more countries a week come over to check it out. There's  already $20 billion in the stimulus bill for health care IT under the Hitech Act. It should all go into putting VistA in every medical and insurance office in the country. It will lower costs for insurance companies, cut out many of the 200,000 medical mistakes that kill Americans each year, doctors will love it.
  

• Best Medical Practices: This is a bit more complicated to explain but basically we'll reward best practices that result in best medical outcomes for patients. Sometimes that means very expensive breast cancer drugs or heart bypass operations. But in other cases sometimes that means catching conditions like diabetes before they require amputations, cancers before they've metastasized. heart disease before it requires that bypass. We'll give bonuses to doctors who keep their patients in good health and heal them instead of paying fee for service for as much as they can order. The beauty of the IT system we'll develop with VistA is that your doctor can look up what works best for people across the country just like you.  60 year old white male of German/Irish descent with stage 1 colon cancer? Sedentary lifestyle? 20 lbs over optimum weight with 12% body fat? Smoker-non smoker?  Drinker-nondrinker? Your doctor can bring up the stats country wide and figure out what's worked and what doesn't whether she's a kid fresh out of med school in East Jesus KS being paid a bonus to help pay off her school loans for locating to East Jesus for a few years like the Blue Dogs want or a twenty year expert at the top of her field working on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is that new drug really better? How about that new surgical procedure or that spiffy new smart bomb guidance system cancer zapper? If it is she can prescribe it, if it's not she doesn't have to, but she'll have to show you those stats and let you decide. That's better and cheaper care for everybody.
  

• Benefits for Business: GM and Chrysler were canaries in the coal mine. Their legacy health care costs (paying for their retirees health insurance) bankrupted them. Our businesses simply can't compete with the Asians and Europeans on world markets paying the health care costs we are now. It's pricing our manufacturers and workers out of business. That's a big reason why GM builds more cars in Ontario than they do in Michigan these days. HR 3200 will  cut those job and profit killing costs and we'll see many more new businesses open up and our big companies will thrive too. There will be no more job lock for folks who have existing conditions or love ones who do.

• Cost: The CBO says HR 3200 is deficit neutral. The cost is $1.042 trillion over 10 years. Most of it is paid for by the savings above. The rest, $239 billion over 10 years will be paid for by the expiring Bush tax cuts (make sure you mention Bush because indies and even many Repubs hate Bush now). It does not add to the US debt.

• Bottom Line: The CBO predicts under HR 3200 by 2019 97% of Americans will have health insurance. Of that number 96% will be covered by for-profit private insurance and 4% will be in the public plan. It won't drive private insurance out of business. If you like the plan you have you can keep it (or in most cases you boss can keep it.) But chances are you and your boss aren't stupid and won't choose to keep the crappy expensive plan with few safeguards and ever rising prices you have now. If you want to it's grandfathered in. Most likely you'll both probably decide to buy a new plan, probably from the same agent and company that's better and cheaper.

HR 3200 operates on real free market principles and opens up the currently government protected rackets in insurance, hospital chains, drugs and doctors to more competition. It mandates protections for consumers, you can't get booted off the rolls if you get sick, your premiums will stop skyrocketing, if you change jobs or start a business you'll still be able to buy insurance because your pre-existing conditions won't exclude you. Your doctor will be able to look up your medical records even if you've lived in 20 different towns over the last twenty years. That means if you had an allergic reaction to a drug when you were 5 it'll still be in there. It also means Rush Limbaugh won't be able to go doctor shopping for his Oxycontin.

Now put on a clean shirt, comb your hair and get yourself to a town hall meeting and bring these points up. It's not like your life doesn't depend on it or anything.

Here are my notes from the Town Hall yesterday starring Judy Biggert IL-13 and Mark Kirk who thinks he's going to win the senate seat Obama used to sit in.  

The venue was great, the Arista Hotel in Naperville is a beautiful place and put on a very nice lunch spread paid for by the Chamber and donations. The Naperville Chamber of Commerce was an excellent host and John Schmidt their CEO did a fine job of moderating the session. I hope they'll continue to host open town halls with our representatives in the future.

Judging by the response of the crowd in the ballroom their presentation went over like a lead balloon.

The event was filled to capacity, over 100 people. It's a shame the Chamber didn't allow the television cameras into the room to show the earful Kirk and Biggert got. They would have been able to record just how much folks in Illinois's 13th congressional district want real health care reform, not what Kirk and Biggert were offering.  

I'm gonna ignore the fact that they showed up over half an hour late for an event most people had to duck out of work in the middle of the day to attend. I'm going to skip the the first 40 minutes which I guess somebody decided at the last minute when they saw all those unfamiliar names who registered should be about Transportation, EFCA and Cap and Trade. At 12:45 they finally got around to health care which was the issue this event was advertised to be about.

But first a bit about Mark Kirk's opening remarks. He made the same speech he made to the City Club of Chicago insiders in April about how Illinois is so corrupt. It was an odd speech, sounded more like he was running for governor than senator. He looked perplexed when the audience sat stonyfaced at his applause and laugh lines that worked so well with the swells who bought Governors Ryan and Blago and hope to buy him. Then he told us how much he likes Patrick Fitzgerald. Maybe Fitzy could explain to him about how he's not supposed to be twittering while he's on duty with the reserves which he's already been nailed for, promised he'd stop but continues to do.    

The highlight of Kirk and Biggert's presentation was a powerpoint slide show with cherry picked charts, almost all of which were 4 or 5 years old with at least one going back to 1999. All to show us how wonderful our health care system is compared to the UK and Canadian systems. While the British and Canadians may or may not have legitimate concerns with their systems the systems themselves bear no relationship to the Democratic proposals for health care reform in this country. The Brits and Canadians have continually modified their systems over the years by complaining to their elected representatives. Just try that with your insurance company.

HR 3200 will make health insurance companies really compete against each other and the public plan in a open market, (the exchange). That will change the government protected monopoly racket that gives us no choices these days. It'll make pharmaceutical companies compete against each other too, and if the government directly negotiates prices with the drug makers our buying power with 330 million people will be able to drive a much harder bargain than the Canadians and their 30 million people get.

With real competition our system will look much more like the Dutch or German system. Nobody is proposing the government take over the hospitals as they've done in the UK and a single payer government run health insurance company like Canada and Medicare, isn't in HR 3200. They ought to quit trying to scare people with that nonsense.

In her remarks on health care Biggert told us her well worn story about her daughter's family who have lived in London for 11 years. It was an attempt to give second hand proof that the UK  health care system is awful. Apparently not so awful mind you that Mrs. Biggert's daughter doesn't continue to subject herself and her children to it.

She gave us obsolete statistics about wait times for surgeries in England and once again claimed there's some webpage about it that's down now because so many people have looked at it. I guess she means it crashed. That webpage is down because the information is out of date. Mrs. Biggert knows perfectly well those statistics are obsolete because an English doctor in one of the hearings she claims congress isn't having on health care set her straight. You can see the video of him debunking most of what she told us yesterday below. Yet she continues spreading these falsehoods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckN5NFmtwYI


Yeah they have some problems in England. But this guy says they knocked wait times down for surgeries to 18 weeks. On the chart Biggert showed us yesterdaym which was years out of date it showed much longer times and in the US it showed us at 23 weeks.

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