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.
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.
The CBO also says HR 3200 is deficit neutral meaning it won't add to the deficit. It'll squeeze inefficiencies and profiteering out of the system for huge savings and the rest of the cost, $239 billion over ten years as Mrs Biggert accurately pointed out, will be covered by rolling back some of Bush's tax cuts for the richest 1% of wage earners.
If the "Medical Rights and Reform Act" they touted instead is so good why didn't they give us copies of it? Why hasn't it been up on the internet? They released it almost two months ago. Why haven't they submitted it to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring? Kirk says he has one page, three page and twelve page versions of it. Twelve pages to fix health care in this country? That's not a health care plan it's a press release.
When it came time to answer questions I asked them why they continue to talk about the English and Canadian systems when they bear no resemblance to HR 3200.
A physician in private practice invited them to come down to his office and compare the exasperating private insurance forms that take up so much of his time with the simple Medicare forms that are so much easier to fill out and submit. By law Medicare has to pay him within two weeks of receiving his bill. Private insurance companies play games and delay paying as long as they like.
A wheelchair repairman spoke of the silly rules that protect manufacturers of new hospital equipment from having to compete for business.
A woman complained about government involvement in health care at all saying the free market could do better. There is no free market in health care, most of us have no choice of who we get health insurance from, we have no recourse if the insurance company decides to drop us because we get sick and we're not profitable enough for them. We have no say if the hospital bills $80 for a single Tylenol tablet and the insurance company tells us what doctors we can see. We've let the free market run health care for decades and they've set up a money making machine that forces us to pay twice what the rest of the world pays for the 37th best health care on the planet.
An Englishman said he has started businesses in the UK, Canada and the US. He made a very important point about how our system is killing American entrepreneurial spirit. While he's well to do and can afford to insure his family there are millions of others who would like to start their own businesses here but don't dare leave jobs with health insurance, don't dare join a start up that doesn't provide it. Mrs. Biggert may mock self employed "yahoos" who make $75,000 a year who don't buy coverage but some people with pre-existing conditions, or family members with them, can't buy health insurance at any price.
The last one, an elderly women shamed them for taking so many campaign contributions from the health care industry to fight against real reform. She called for the public option and said it's inexcusable to fight against reform when our current health care system is way down on the scale somewhere between Costa Rica and Slovenia.
Of the people who were called on I counted 3 who supported Kirk and Biggert's position and 7 who support the President's. The crowd was polite, there were few interruptions, there was no chanting, no outbursts to drown out the speakers as we've all seen teabaggers doing across the country on tv by now. But it was obvious from the reaction that most of the folks in the hall wanted to see HR 3200 enacted into law.
That's what happened yesterday in Naperville. I hope Mrs. Biggert and Mr. Kirk got the message.
I was interviewed by Mike Flannery of CBS2 news for about 5 minutes and a FOX guy too. As you can see from the CBS2 clip the media only wants to see a fight not facts.(CNN) -- U.S. forces faced off against Afghan insurgents in a standoff Monday that caught women and children between the armed groups, a U.S. military official told CNN.
The Marines' restrained approach differs from previous hits on compounds when airstrikes were readily called in, the official said.
The standoff in the town of Khan Neshin is especially significant because the U.S. military earlier reported that the Afghan government regained control of the town Monday, which was a Taliban stronghold for several years.
Coalition forces began talks with local leaders several days ago, and have moved about 500 Marines into Khan Neshin, a U.S. military news release said. With the government takeover of Khan Neshin, it is the first time coalition forces have a sustained presence so far south in the Helmand River valley, the release said.
The mission to secure Khan Neshin coincides with "establishing secure conditions" for August elections in Afghanistan, according to the release.
As per usual the insurgents fired on the marines and then withdrew to a compound with several buildings. The marines surrounded the place and through an intepreter called on the insurgents to let any women and chldren in the compound go. They let some out and after further negotiations more followed. Now it remains to be seen if the marines and the insurgents can come to some kind of agreement to end this skirmish without more bloodshed.
I'd have the interpreter tell 'em that drone up there has 4 hours of fuel left and there'll be another on station before it has to go back to base. They can hang around for weeks, long after your water and food is gone. If you so much as tippietoe four feet outside the compound, day or night, one of those things can plant a hellfire missile within a yard of you and blow you to bits. That's a pretty fultile way to make your point and I can't imagine Allah wants you to die in vain. So drop your weapons, come on out and let's talk.
It ain't much, but it's a start.
I don't need to tell you how important this race is. With Begich's all but certain win in Alaska, Franken's pretty good odds in the Minnesota recount, a Martin victory in the runoff on December 2 would give us a filibuster proof 60 Democratic US senators.
Sure Lieberman won't vote with us on some issues but where he won't we'll be able to pick off some of the more reality based Republicans. Anybody really think Lugar isn't going to go along with Obama on Iraq? With a 60 vote majority it'll be almost impossible for McConnell to hold his caucus together on Iraq, healthcare, and any number of issues.
There's no better candidate to retire than the execrable Saxby Chambliss. He's a chickenhawk on a par with Cheney, five Vietnam era student deferments until he found a doctor to give him a medical deferment for a "football" knee. Yet he's marched in lockstep with Bush on Iraq.
We all remember his disgusting 2002 ad against Max Cleland tieing him to Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for standing up to Bush on workers' rights at the then new Homeland Security Dept. Even John McCain called the ad "reprehensible" and "worse than disgraceful" back then for attacking the patriotism of a man who lost three limbs for his country. Of course that hasn't stopped McCain from going to GA to campaign for Chambliss the past couple of weeks.
Chambliss is also a blatant racist. I know that's not so uncommon in the south, even in 2008. But it ought to be and there's no better way to show the Republican party that the Southern Strategy is deader than the confederacy than to send this creep packing.
A few examples: following the 9/11 attacks, Chambliss said Georgia ought to "arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line." During early voting last month as African Americans were turning out in droves as expected, Chambliss told his white supporters that "the other folks are voting" to push Republicans to get out and vote. In another instance, Chambliss told the New York Times that the "rush to the polls by African-Americans" in Georgia "has also got our side energized, [because] they see what is happening." After failing on 11/4 to get 50%+1 of the vote required under Georgia law to avoid a runoff, Chambliss in a Fox News interview said it was due to the "high percentage of minority vote" this year and the the fact that "we weren't able to get enough of our folks out on Election Day." Now the vote in Georgia sadly still breaks down overwhelmingly along racial lines. But we only need to turn a small percentage of white voters and/or inform Georgia minority voters about how important it is that they elect this Democratic senator. It's eminently winnable. Kos's poll done by R2K shows Chambliss up only 49-46% in this two way race.
Jim Martin, served in Vietnam, is an accomplished legal scholar, and was a Georgia state legislator for 18 years. The guy's no lightweight. He supports the Employee Free Choice Act (union check card), wants to get us out of Iraq and has run TV ads attacking Chambliss for not supporting Obama's agenda. Of course Saxby has attacked Martin for supporting Obama. That tells me pretty much all I need to know about the most important issue at stake here: how they'd vote in the senate for the next 6 years.
So if you have some free time over the next week and a half and are still fired up and ready to go sign up to make calls for Jim Martin. As anyone who has read Kos or Nate Silver the last few weeks knows this run off is like most special elections. It's all about GOTV, flushing the base. Turnout is expected to be low, maybe much lower than the general. Nat'l Republicants are putting everything they have into saving Saxby Chambliss. They won't give it up easily. It's up to us to take it away from them.
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