Posts from — August 2008

Summer has been busy and I haven’t had time to write as much as I’d like. Some important votes have slipped by without comment. One that I think is of particular interest is the vote on June 24 on H.R. 6331: Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act of 2008. Medicare recipients and the physicians who care for them should take special note.

On July 1st 2008, physicians participating in the Medicare program were scheduled to receive a 10 percent cut in reimbursement. An additional 5 percent cut was to take place in 2009. These cuts, if enacted, could have been devastating to both physicians, who are struggling to maintain the solvency of their practices in the face of reimbursement reductions by state, federal and private payers, and to Medicare recipients, who are faced with increasing difficulty in finding physicans willing to treat Medicare patients. According to the American Medical Association, as many as 60% of physicians would have been forced to limit their services to Medicare recipients under the proposed cuts.

In an effort to prevent these cuts from taking place, Democrats in the House, led by Rep. Charles Rangel, introduced H.R. 6331. In addition to to stopping the physician pay cuts, the bill provided for a number of modest improvements to the Medicare program to aid beneficiaries including:

• Coverage of additional preventive services
• Elimination of late enrollment penalties for the part D drug benefit
• Coverage of pulmonary and cardiac rehabilitation
• Elimination of higher co-payments for mental health services

Prior to the vote, President Bush threatened to veto the bill because it would have reduced payments to Medicare Advantage plans - private health insurance plans that offer alternatives to traditional Medicare under contract with CMS. Such plans currently receive, on average, about 12% more than the cost of services for recipients in traditional Medicare. Outside the Administration, there is widespread feeling that these plans, which are supposed to reduce costs through careful medical management, should be receiving reimbursements at a level lower than the costs of traditional Medicare, although insurance companies argue that the cuts will increase out-of-pocket costs and decrease options for Medicare Advantage recipients.

When the bill came to a vote on June 24, Peter Roskam voted no, siding with the Bush administration in its desire to allow the pay cuts to take effect. The bill passed but was vetoed by the President on July 15. That veto was quickly overridden by the House and Senate and has become law.

Physicians and Medicare recipients in the 6th district should ask Peter Roskam why he voted to support pay cuts for Medicare physicians. Roskam can be reached at his Washington office at (202) 225-4561 or in Bloomingdale at (630) 893-9670.

When it comes to earmarks, Peter Roskam’s message is “do as I say, not as I do”.

Last fall, Peter Roskam got together with a bunch of fellow Republican extremists who were feeling desperate about their party’s chances in the upcoming 2008 elections after 7 horrible years of mismanagement, malfeasance, and downright criminality by their President, George W. Bush. They decided the only answer was to bring back Ronald Reagan from the dead and so they founded a kind of Ronald Regan resurrection club.

They called their club “Reagan 21” . This is what they had to say about their club:

Republicans have a proud tradition of upholding Ronald Reagan’s principles of liberty and a vision for the 21st Century. That vision is an America that espouses individual freedom, free enterprise, and common-sense values. Americans are crying out for leadership with courage, principle, and integrity. Reagan 21, a new conservative group uniting Republican leaders from both chambers of Congress, was formed to fill this leadership void. Reagan21 presents a positive alternative to the current majority in Congress.

Now I could fill a book about Reagan’s “common-sense values“ (remember Iran-Contra, Reagan’s brutal war in Central America, his opposition to gay rights, his indifference to the poor and to persons with AIDS?) but that is not the point here. The Reagan 21 club proclaimed its emphasis on Integrity and Ethics, presumably because the Jack Abramoff model of the previous few years wasn’t working for them anymore:

Americans deserve to have elected officials who represent them, including Members of Congress, abide by the highest possible standards of professional conduct and personal ethics. No Member of Congress should engage in any activity in which there is or could be a conflict of interest between his or her official duties or activities on behalf of his constituents and any personnel interest of that Member. This duty to avoid conflicts of interest is critical to public confidence in the integrity of our nation’s government. To effectuate this duty, Members must not only aggressively avoid any conflict of interest but also any activity in which there could be even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

One of the ways the Reagan 21 club proposed to promote ethics and integrity in Congress was to end the practice of earmarks. Earmarks are Congress’s way of bypassing the executive branch agencies and allocating funds directly to specific favored pet projects. Earmarks in an appropriation bill are often called “pork”. Citizen’s Against Government Waste, an advocacy group formed to “eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government”, identified 7 criteria for identifying pork:

• Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
• Not specifically authorized;
• Not competitively awarded;
• Not requested by the President;
• Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
• Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
• Serves only a local or special interest.

Senators and Congressmen often rail against pork spending but tend to like it because it can be a way of making themselves popular in their home district, effectively buying votes with highly visible projects that would not other wise be funded.

Here’s what the Reagan 21 club has to say about earmarks:

Recognizing this critical duty, House Republicans in 1994 pledged to “re-establish the bonds of trust between the United States Congress and the American people.” Regrettably, we failed to achieve and maintain this goal. Now Congress must reinvigorate its efforts to reestablish those bonds of trust and hold every Member to a zero tolerance standard in which no self-dealing or appearance of impropriety whatsoever will be tolerated.

One of the main culprits of self-dealing is the practice of “earmarking.” The 1981 transportation bill contained only 10 earmarks. President Reagan vetoed a transportation bill in 1987 that contained 121 earmarks, saying, ‘I haven’t seen this much lard since I handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair.’ In 2005, Congress passed a transportation bill that included an astonishing 6,371 earmarks at a cost of $27.3 billion.

The year before Republicans took the majorities in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, there were 1,400 earmarks. Last year, there were more than 14,000.

So we see that, while most Republican complain about pork and try to blame it on the Democrats, they have been, in actuality, big pork fans. But the Reagan 21 Republicans said that all was going to change. They were going to end earmarks. Yes that’s right, Roskam signed on to a group that declared its intent to pursue a full ban on earmarks, whose members subscribed to a set of core values that included ending all earmarks.

So. How’s Roskam doing in his quest to bring integrity back to Washington by ending the practice of earmarks. Sad to say, not so good. As of today, Roskam’s house website lists a whopping $163, 086, 569 in earmarks for FY ‘08 and FY ‘09. Mr. Roskam really does like his pork, all his pretensions about being a fiscal conservative to the contrary.

I can only speak for myself but this kind of pisses me off. I’m sure there are many worthwhile projects included in Roskam’s long list of earmarks but we have been listening to Roskam lecture the Democrats in Congress on wasteful spending every time they try to do something to help folks who are truly suffering and all the while Roskam is buying votes back home with these projects that bypass the normal appropriations process.

If it makes you mad too, I’d suggest you give Roskam a call and ask him “what’s with all the pork?” Roskam can be reached at his Washington office at (202) 225-4561 or in Bloomingdale at (630) 893-9670.

I’ve written about it before, but I’m seeing an increasing number of hits on this website from residents of the 6th Congressional District who are seeking to bring an end to the annoying onslaught of robo calls from their Congressman, Peter Roskam. Roskam, who is obviously concerned about his re-election chances this fall, is using the calls to promote his plan to exploit the current crisis in fuel prices as an opportunity to help the big oil companies that play a significant role in funding his campaigns. These calls, while pretty clearly designed to aid his campaign, appear to be originating from his Congressional office as they don’t bear any funding message. I can only presume they are being paid for by the taxpayers. I am not knowledgeable about the legal or ethical implications of the use of government resources for such a purpose.

I have been seeing a notable increase in hits from persons in the area using search strings like “stop peter roskam robo phone calls’, “stop peter roskam phone calls”, and “peter roskam phone calls at home”. I too have been the recipient of these phone calls, most recently just a couple of days ago, and I too find them objectionable. Sadly, this site has no solution to offer. I can only prevail on Representative Roskam once again to set up a registry to exclude those of us who do not wish to receive his automatic messaging. This seems only fair since we appear to be paying for them. I would be very happy to use this site to help him promote such an option, free of charge.