On the first anniversary of the the signing into law of the $862 billion economic stimulus passage it is appropriate to extend thanks to President Obama and to the Democratic leadership in Congress for its success in bringing the country out of recession and away from the brink of economic collapse that may have rivaled the Great Depression. While recovery is not complete and there are large numbers of Americans still unemployed, there are many hopeful signs. The economy grew at a rate of 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2009, the fastest rate in 6 years.
While there is room to argue about what has helped and what hasn’t, there is no excuse for the nasty display of trash talk exhibited today by Peter Roskam and his fellow Republicans, many of whom hypocritically touted stimulus money being spent in their districts after having voted against it.Their behavior today was appalling. They take joy in signs of new economic difficulty hoping that the country’s failure will bring them political success in upcoming midterm elections. But their behavior is destructive to the nation’s morale and destructive to the recovery itself. This is not what they were elected to do. The nation deserves better.
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.
Had fun this first morning of my vacation playing with the GOP’s nifty new link-shortener. Here is a picture of RubberStampRoskam.com all conservatized. Don’t stare at the red bar too long because it contains subliminal messaging that will melt liberal brains.
You can make just about anything more conservative using this ingenious new tool. What will Michael Steele think of next?
Roskam joined with the also soon-to-be retired Congressman and notable flip-flopper Mark Kirk (who was for closing Guantanamo before he was against it), Congresswoman Judy Biggert, and Congressman Don Manzullo to protest the administration’s proposal to bring prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center to a largely unused facility in Thomson, Illinois.
Roskam asserts that that to bring these prisoners to Illinois would put the public at risk and “dissuade businesses from coming to the state”.
“The Obama administration’s utter inability to create jobs here does not somehow make sending some of the world’s worst terrorists to our backyard a good idea,”
And if we are to believe Mark Kirk (who actually voted for the Guantanamo closure before he fell in love with Sarah Palin), Osama Bin Laden himself is likely to take up residence in Skokie and Chicago’s most prominent landmarks immediately destroyed.
All of this is, of course, a big load of hooey. The transfer could produce 2,000-3,000 job in a state that badly needs jobs. And the state has for some time already housed terrorists in federal facilities without any of the problems that the “Frightening Four” predict.
Our Republican Congressman Peter Roskam appeared on WLS AM’s Roe Conn show this afternoon continuing his aggressive campaign to block any meaningful healthcare reform legislation. Here’s the audio:
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Roskam is obviously pretty pleased with himself about his little theatrical performance with the handcuffs on the House floor the other day. Its a shame we have a Congressman who constantly resorts to stunts and party talking points to scare his constituents rather than engage in serious efforts to resolve the issues that are making their lives difficult. If Roskam gets his way on healthcare, it won’t be long until members of Congress are the only Americans who will be able to afford adequate care.
Roskam’s latest scare tactic is to talk about the individual mandate provision in the House bill that was passed on Saturday. The Republican party has decided that scaring the public about individual mandates to purchase healthcare insurance is the best means they have to kill health reform and Old Rubber Stamp has been quick to take that message on the road. It wasn’t too long ago though that Republican leaders were talking about individual mandates as being a good thing – ensuring individual responsibility. Watch Republican Senator Charles Grassley extol the virtues of individual mandates on Fox News:
Individual mandates are a good thing because, without them, the cost of caring for people without insurance in emergency rooms raises the cost of health insurance for the rest of us – maybe as much as $1800 per year. People who can afford to obtain health insurance must do so as a matter of responsibility. Grassley says: “I believe there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates.”
And listen to these guys talk about mandates – 2008 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Grassley again, Republican Senator Bob Bennett, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, and former Republican Senate Majority leader Bill Frist:
But now Senators Grassley and Snowe and the rest of the party are opposing mandates. Grassley is questioning their constitutionality. Roskam is pulling out his handcuffs. What happened?
Well a couple of things, I think. As I have already suggested, the Republican Party has determined that this is the best strategy to kill health reform and cause the Democrats in Congress and the President to fail, and that is what they want more than anything else, even if it means the American people continue to suffer due to unmanageable healthcare expenses and lack of access to care. I think the other thing that’s operating here is the Democratic bill’s inclusion of effective insurance regulatory reform. Republicans would probably be very happy with mandates in a reform bill, if it didn’t come from the Democrats, and if it included massive insurance de-regulation as the present, Republican alternative bill does, without any public option to compete with private insurers. The health insurance industry supported mandates and have donated heavily to Republicans to get them included in any reform plan. But the public option was a buzzkill and so Republicans have reversed and are now attacking mandates.
The health insurance industry is isn’t anything like the bogeyman that some on the left portray it it to be. It’s like any industry looking after its stockholders first and foremost, but trying to be competitive by offering a high-quality high-value product that consumers and employers will want to buy. The companies are staffed by honorable people who subscribe to the same plans that they sell. Most of the horror stories in the media involve gross distortions of insurers role in medical decision making and the size of the profit margins that companies earn on their products.
Because health insurers have built-in incentives to control medical cost while maintaining quality of care, I believe it is possible, and perhaps desirable, to build an effective universal coverage plan based the private sector. But such a plan can only succeed in providing affordable universal coverage if there are effective individual and employer mandates, strong industry regulation, and a public option to fill in the gaps. Far from destroying, the private sector, CBO estimates that millions more Americans will obtain private coverage under the Democratic plan. And Roskam’s lies to the contrary, this plan does not involve the government taking control over 1/6 of the economy. Nothing changes hands. There is no nationalization of physician practices or hospitals or insurance companies. All that stays as it is now, in the private sector. This is not communism no matter what the teabaggers signs may say.
If the Republicans reject the individual mandate, there is still another option – single payer. But of course they reject that as well. They want only for reform to fail.
Rather than work seriously toward and effective solution to the nation’s healthcare crisis, Roskam and his Republican colleagues have offered a phony reform plan based in medical malpractice caps and insurance de-regulation that will do nothing to increase the proportion of Americans with health coverage based on CBO analysis. And if you like what Republican de-regulation has done for the banking industry, you’ll love what it does for healthcare.
One more point of correction for Peter Roskam on his statements on the radio today – Senator Lieberman has no conscience.
Well we’ve listened to Peter Roskam for months badmouthing Democratic efforts to address the nation’s growing healthcare crisis. During that time what’s been missing is Roskam’s own plan to make healthcare affordable and available to all Americans.
Well the wait is over and the plan is in. And it is really, really stupid.
It came the other day in the form of an ammendment to H.R. 3962, the Affordable Healthcare for America Act, offered House Minority Leader and Chief Idiot John Boehner. The Boehner ammendment essentially replaces all of the provisions of that bill, the House Democratic plan, with a great big Christmas present to the healthcare industry.
Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which Peter Roskam has repeatedly cited as authoritative in discussing the Democratic plans, released its evaluation of the Boehner ammendment. You can read the whole thing here.
Essentially though, the CBO finds that the Republican plan would actually increase the number of Americans with no health insurance coverage by 2019 when population growth is considered. The CBO found that the Republican plan would make it possible for only an additional 3 million Americans to obtain health coverage (compared to 34 million for the House Democratic plan) making not even a dent in the percentage of American without coverage. 17% now. 17% in 2019. This compared with the Democratic plan which reduces the percentage of uninsured to 4% in the same period.
Ironically, the Republican plan will only cut the deficit by $68 billion, compared to $104 billion for the Democratic plan.
The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It’s already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It’s already made its compromises with reality. It’s already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans.
The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It’s one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It’s another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren’t even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn’t perfect, but in comparison, it’s looking astonishingly good.
Key to the Republican plan are a couple of provisions that Peter Roskam likes to tout: capping damages in medical malpractice cases and allowing insurance companies to sell policies across state lines. These are huge gifts to the healthcare industry which has poured so much money into the campaign coffers of Roskam and other Republicans. They are also huge mistakes.
Capping malpractice damages would effectively immunize healthcare provider conglomerates against negative consequences when they screw up. This would reduce the incentive that healthcare providers currently have to improve quality and prevent errors and would leave consumers who are harmed by medical errors or negligence with little recourse.
Allowing policies to be sold across state lines would mean that health insurers would flock to jurisdictions where insurance regulations are minimal. Premiums would rise and benefit plans would shrink. Consumers will pay more for health insurance and get less.
