Haven’t been able to post here in a while because our PC has been out of order and blogging from a Blackberry is not easy. We finally have a loaner.
We’ve been hearing a lot from Representative Peter Roskam lately, trash-talking the recently passed health insurance reforms that were signed into law by President Obama. Roskam has gone on record as wanting to strip his constituents of the new benefits they obtained in that historic legislation and he has been using the taxpayer-funded resources of his office and friendly corporate media to wage a misinformation campaign regarding the new law.
We were excited to find this video last night of Peter Roskam’s opponent Ben Lowe speaking on health care in America. Listen to what a real leader sounds like, then go and help Ben become a voice for working people in Congress.
Congressman Peter Roskam, the Republican representing Illinois’ 6th Congressional District in Chicago’s western suburbs, this week launched his campaign to repeal the landmark healthcare reform legislation recently signed into law by President Obama. Roskam, who campaigned vigorously against the bill and who voted against its passage, complains that the legislation raises healthcare costs and taxes on the middle class, piles on to the national debt, and interferes with the doctor-patient relationship.
Roskam’s complaints, are, of course, baseless. The health reform legislation will provide subsidies for low- and middle-class families to make health insurance more affordable, reduces the deficit by $132 billion over 10 years, and does absolutely nothing to disrupt the relationship between patients and physicians. And it will make health insurance available to millions of working Americans who do not have access to coverage today – 32 million by 2019. Roskam, however, is determined not to let that happen. He says the plan is a radical government takeover of healthcare. It isn’t. It is simply sound insurance regulation coupled with subsidies to make insurance more affordable. In fact, as the President has pointed out, the health exchanges that will be created under the new law are very similar to a plan created by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has produced a couple of excellent resources to help you understand what is covered under the new healthcare legislation and the timeline over which changes will take place. If we had real representation in Congress, your Congressman would be helping you to understand this information. Since he will not, we will try to help to the degree that we are able.
Roskam’s opposition to the healthcare bill appears to be rooted in large part, not so much in the details of the reform plan, but rather in an overwhelming desire to see the President fail in order to advance his own party’s electoral prospects. Roskam is also a steadfast opponent of any kind of consumer-friendly industry regulation, be it in the realm of healthcare, banking, or the environment. We have all already seen the disatrous results of the Republican deregulatory ideology in creating the recent banking and credit crisis with the resultant recession. Now Roskam, if he has his way, would replace the Democratic reform legislation with a massive deregulation of the health insurance industry that will do nothing to help working people but will help line the pockets of the insurance companies that fund his campaigns.
Though his his claims about the dangers of the healthcare reform legislation are without merit, Roskam has enormous resources at his disposal. His Congressional office gives him tremendous access to corporate media eager to help him in his misinformation campaign and his Congressional budget and franking privileges allow him to produce mailers like we saw last summer designed to scared district residents about reform. We will have to be strong and fight hard to keep him from taking away our hard-won health benefits.
We encourage you to contact Peter Roskam to voice your support for healthcare reform and to ask him to cease his efforts to take away your benefits. You can reach him at (630) 893-9670 in Bloomingdale or at (202) 225-4561 in Washington.
Roskam has also taken to Twitter as part of his efforts to kill health reform. You can talk back to him directly there. He is @PeterRoskam and he is tweeting about repeal using the tag #218hcr. We are doing are best to counteract his misinformation there.
We owe a big thank you today to Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez who today, together with the rest of the House Hispanic Caucus, announced his intent to vote for the Democratic healthcare reform bill when it comes to the floor, possibly as soon as Sunday. Representative Gutierrez had been hesitating to offer his support for the plan because of its ban on undocumented immigrants buying into the plan, and because of the administration’s failure to push aggressively for immigration reform during the President’s first year in office. We too are disappointed on both fronts but we think that Rep. Gutierrez chose the best course in agreeing to vote for healthcare reform. We fear that a defeat on the present healthcare plan, with all of its weaknesses, would not only set the cause of improving our healthcare system back by years, but would probably jeopardize any chance of movement on immigration reform for the foreseeable future. We thank Representative Gutierrez for his vote and for his determined efforts on behalf of justice for immigrants. I’d encourage you to call and thank him but the best thanks is probably to give his staff a break from phone calls.
Republican Peter Roskam is another story. Roskam appears to be unbending in his decision to vote against increased access to healthcare for residents of the sixth district. Indeed, Roskam today unveiled a new talking point on Twitter designed to work the anti-statist teabaggers up into a frenzy: that healthcare reform will give enormous new powers to the Internal Revenue Service and that we will all be soon set upon by an army of 16,000 new auditors. We find Roskam’s anti-IRS rhetoric a tad frightening in light of the recent suicide attack on the IRS facility in Austin.
Roskam had to change his tactic todaywhen the Congressional Budget Office today released its scoring of the Democratic bill, making ridiculous Roskam’s claims that it would increase the debt. The CBO found that the bill actually REDUCES deficits by $130 billion over the first 10 years, and by a staggering $1.2 trillion over the second 10 years. This while providing an additional 32 million Americans with coverage and eliminating the worry of denials based upon pre-existing conditions. Plus the seniors who Roskam has been trying scare about Medicare cuts will have their prescription drug doughnut hole, a gift from President Bush and the last Republican Congress, closed, making their prescriptions more affordable and thereby preventing avoidable hospitalizations related to drug non-compliance.
Peter Roskam is on the wrong side of history in his opposition to this bill.
There is no uncertainty what Peter Roskam will do when the Democratic healthcare reform package comes to a vote, probably later this week. Roskam will vote “no”. Roskam vote will be just the culmination of a year of effort on his part to block the President and Congress from doing anything meaningful to help Illinois residents who are suffering because the can’t afford to purchase healthcare insurance, because they have a pre-existing condition that makes getting coverage impossible, or because the insurance they have won’t pay for the care they need.
Roskam has not only argued against healthcare reform in Committee and on the House floor. No, rather than listen to his constituents and understand their needs, he has undertaken an intensive misinformation campaign designed to promote fear and confusion about the Democratic plans amongst his constituency. And he has used your tax dollars in this war of deception, spending them on huge volumes of direct mail, robo-calls, and town hall meetings designed only to air his point of view. Why is he doing this? First and foremost to cause the President to fail for political gain – a failure on health reform may make other Democratic reforms on immigration and finance more difficult and improve Republican prospects in the 2010 election. And, of course, because it is the will of the big insurance companies who help fund his campaign.
If Roskam is successful in his efforts, and the Democratic healthcare plan fails, thousands will continue to die and suffer needlessly due to lack of care. The bill that is expected to emerge this week will not be a perfect solution. A single-payer plan or national health service would do more to improve quality and reduce costs, but this is a huge first step.
More troubling than Roskam sure “no” vote at this point is an expected “no” vote by Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez, of the 4th Congressional District in Chicago. Representative Gutierrez is a fine and principled legislator who is an outspoken advocate for badly-needed immigration reform. Representative Gutierrez is rightly upset that the healthcare reform plan on the table would exclude undocumented immigrants from coverage. This exclusion is not merely unjust, it is also bad policy. It will continue to force undocumented immigrants to use emergencies rooms for care. Care rendered will be less effective and more expensive than it would if these workers were included in reform plans. And undocumented workers tend to be younger and healthier than the population at large so their addition to risk pools could reduce premiums for everyone.
Representative Gutierrez is also upset because he feels that President Obama abandoned his pledge to make immigration reform a top priority during his first year in office. We too are disappointed, but I’m not sure that candidate Obama had any real sense of how difficult the healthcare fight would be or of the depths to which the Republican Party would sink in obstructing the Democratic agenda. We think it unlikely that the President could have, practically speaking, advanced immigration reform during the first year but we don’t see that as an abandonment by the President of the cause.
But whether that is true or not, we feel certain that Representative Gutierrez has the potential to kill both immigration reform and healthcare reform in one fell swoop, along with the rest of the Democratic agenda, if he casts a “no” vote on healthcare reform as he has suggested he may do. If healthcare reform fails, we believe that it is over. Neither immigration reform nor any other progressive reform is likely to go anywhere, and Representative Gutierrez will likely end up fighting for immigration justice with a Republican Congress and a Republican President hostile to immigrants.
So, Illinois, Peter Roskam already has his mind made up. Calling him will do you know good. Please call Representative Gutierrez instead and thank him for standing up for immigrants while asking him to change his mind and vote “yes” on healthcare reform. His contact information can be found here.
Republican Representative Peter Roskam appeared on the ever “fair and balanced” Fox and Friends this past Friday morning for another of his Fox-facilitated rants on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic partisanship. Take a look:
Roskam’s villainization of Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic efforts to achieve universal healthcare coverage is laughable.
Back in early 2009, after President Obama was sworn in, national support for healthcare reform was high. A CNN/Opinion Research Survey conducted in February 2009 found that 72% of Americans favored an increased roll for the government in healthcare, with 60% believing that the government should provide health insurance or healthcare to all Americans. In a Kaiser Foundation poll conducted the same month, 62% of respondents felt it was more important than ever to take on healthcare reform now and 72% of respondents trusted the recommendations of President Obama on healthcare reform. Even as late as June of 2009, in a Employee Benefit Research Institute poll, 83% of respondents favored a new government healthcare plan that anyone can purchase.
So Americans wanted healthcare reform and they even liked the idea of a public plan, and that left Roskam and the Reublicans in Congress with a dilemma. For political reasons, they needed Obama and the Democrats to fail so that Republican prospects would be better in the 2010 mid-term elections and beyond. And they needed to satisfy their financial backers in the big business lobbies and the healthcare companies that were opposed to reform. Last summer, Peter Roskam’s friend in the Senate, Jim DeMint, famously announced the GOP intent to have healthcare reform become President Obama’s “Waterloo”.
But how do you kill a popular program? The GOP decided to play on its strengths: to lie and sow fear and confusion about Democratic reform plans. And so they embarked on a campaign of misinformation.
They engaged spin doctor Frank Luntz to craft talking points designed to scare the public about healthcare reform. The organized astroturf groups to spread misinformation and to fund and fan the flames of the paranoid, racist Tea Party movement. They used Republican-controlled Fox News to blare their anti-reform message 24 hours a day. And GOP members took to the airwaves themselves spouting lies about death panels, massive cuts to Medicare, uncontrolled spending, and a government takeover of healthcare complete with rationing.
Peter Roskam has been an enthusiastic participant in all of this. He’s been on local an national media constantly promulgating these lies and even used over a million dollars of taxpayer funds to blanket homes in the district with mailers – an average of about 11 per household in the 3rd quarter – as part of this partisan campaign.
Naturally, people are now suspicious.
Now the GOP has shifted to playing the role of being helpless victims of extreme Democratic partisanship. President Obama has offered a summit on healthcare in response to their pleas to be listened to and now, laughably, they are calling it a trap:
Peter Roskam and the GOP are liars. They are lying to kill healthcare reform because they want the President to fail and because their big corporate donors don’t want reform. And if their efforts to kill reform succeed, then Americans will continue to suffer and die for lack of coverage. And they are still gleeful about what they have done.
Because the GOP have demonstrated their unwillingness to be honest participants in formulating a workable reform plan, Democrats should make every effort possible to pass reform by reconciliation, ignoring the continued GOP effort to sabotage the process.
Peter Roskam’s conduct in all of this has been reprehensible – adolescent if not sociopathic. I sincerely hope that voters will see that and replace him this fall.
Humiliated by his recent fruitless efforts to frighten Illinois residents about the proposed use of the Thomson Correctional Center to house prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Peter Roskam today redirected his efforts back to scaring Illinois residents about healthcare reform. Essentially his argument is that if the government gives you healthcare, you’ll lose your job.
Roskam appeared today on the friendly Fox network touting a report from the Illinois Policy Institute, which he calls a “non-partisan think tank”, that indicates that Illinois will lose 169,000 job if health reform is passed. Roskam is asked directly two times to explain the mechanism for this job loss but doesn’t really do so. Instead he rants about Illinois unemployment rates exceeding the Obama administration estimates. Here’s the video:
As is typical with Roskam, what comes out of his mouth is only peripherally related to the truth. The Illinois Policy Institute (IPI) likes to style itself as a “non-partisan research organization, but what it really is is an ideologically-driven advocacy group. They work for economic deregulation, regressive tax policy, and other right-wing causes, and against policies that benefit working people, like a fair minimum wage . They are also an “astroturf” group – organizing so-called “grass roots” efforts from the top down via their Liberty Leaders program, hardly a non-partisan effort. The group is secretive about its funding sources, saying only that the organization “welcomes donations from individuals, foundations, and other organizations that support free market principles”. According to Sourcewatch, they have received funding from the CATO Institute.
And they are connected with the teabagger movement. Both CEO John Tilliman and Executive Vice-president Kristina Rasmussen spoke at the April 15th teabagger event in Chicago. And that is fine, but please don’t insult our intelligence bby call this a “non-partisan think tank”.
The IPI, apparently being a think-tank unprepared to do its own thinking brought in a hired gun to write the report Roskam refers to: Adding Insult to Injury. The scholar in question is discredited economist Arthur Laffer, seen in the following video scoffing at fellow economist Peter Schiff’s prediction of an impending economic collapse on CNBC in August 2006:
Laffer is, of course, more famous for his role in the development of Reagonomics in the 1980s. His theory known as the “Laffer Curve” proposed that lowering taxes on the wealthy would result in increased tax revenues and a balanced budget. It didn’t work out and Reagan saddled his successor, Bill Clinton, with an enormous deficit, which Clinton fixed, only to have another Republican President, George W. Bush, reapply the failed policy with a vengeance, leaving us in the enormous mess we’re in today.
Not suprisingly, Laffer’s report finds that instead of the Democratic reform proposals we should instead de-regulate the insurance industry and implement tort reform, proposals that will, have talked about here before, do nothing to resolve the problem of the uninsured and instead will result in higher premiums and lower benefits for those lucky enough to have insurance at all as state-imposed benefit mandates and rate regulations are castrated. Meanwhile, the giant healthcare corporations will be given immunity from lawsuits, leaving consumers little recourse when they are harmed by sub-standard care.
I find it very sad and infuriating to see our Representative Peter Roskam, who is supposed to be listening to us and advocating for our interests in Washington, instead engaging in this never-ending marketing campaign aimed at killing any chance that those in his district who presently do not have access to healthcare will be given an affordable solution. It really is time for Roskam to be replaced.
