Should Iowa, Wyoming determine health care policy for 300 million Americans?
Mike Enzi, Republican Senator from Wyoming, Pop 510,000 (2005)
Charles Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, Pop 3 million (2008)
It sounds as if the Obama Administration is finally coming to its senses and is ready to dump the anti-reform tag-team of Grassley and Enzi in favor of health care policies that actually help 300 million Americans, especially the 47+ million uninsured.
After so many years of listening to all the reasons why my home state of New Hampshire and that corn-field known as Iowa should not have the first primary and caucuses for president, it is astonishing that two Republican senators from states with a total population of about 3.5 million should be allowed to have such a major impact on health care policy for the rest of the country.
How David Axelrod and Company could have missed the major lesson of the Clinton reform effort is equally astonishing. It was not that Hillary held “secret meetings,” or that the reform plan was too complicated, or that it was “socialistic,” or that she did not include enough politicians in her deliberations (she did). It failed because the Republicans wanted it to fail. And they wanted it to fail because they do not believe that the poor deserve health care. In other words, like most Republicans, they were greedy and did not want to pay for someone else’s health insurance.
They still don’t. Nothing has changed folks. The GOP is still the party of the rich, the entitled, the haves. And they will do everything they can to keep their stash as safe as possible, the rest of the country be damned.
Grassley and Enzi?
Let ‘em go home and shuck corn and shovel cow shit. That’s where they belong.
Exclusive photo! Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Tipper Gore.
When then-First Lady Hillary Clinton held a health care forum at Bunker Hill Community College in 1993, she was joined by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al Gore.
As the editor of the Hillary Clinton Quarterly, I assigned a photographer to cover the event. Here is one exclusive photo from that event. I had almost forgotten that we had these pictures. They show us a rare moment in time – and they all certainly seem to be enjoying themselves.
Enjoy!
– Frank
Tipper Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy at Health Care Forum, Boston 1993.
Big surprise: wealthy conservatives behind attacks on health care reform.
A recent story by Real News Network identified the major players and the money behind the attacks on health care reform.
Along with a significant investment in media advertising, several of these groups have also been stoking the anti-reform anger boiling over at town hall meetings.
Who are wearing the black hats in this political melodrama? According to Real News Network –
Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is led by health care entrepreneur Rick Scott, the co-founder of Solantic urgent care walk-in centers, which he’s spread across Florida and is looking to expand. While 80 percent of its patients have at least some insurance, Solantic also bills itself as an alternative to emergency-room care and a resource for patients with no insurance.
FreedomWorks, which has been advocating against the overhaul but has not launched TV ads, is chaired by Dick Armey, the former Republican majority leader of the House of Representatives from Texas.
Patients First and Patients United are creations of a larger group called Americans for Prosperity. AFP’s Web site describes a grassroots organization with more than 700,000 members that advocates “for public policies that champion the principles of entrepreneurship and fiscal and regulatory restraint. It was started by billionaire David Koch, of the Koch Industries oil family, one of the country’s top donors to conservative, free-market causes. The foundation’s board includes Art Pope, a former North Carolina legislator also involved in conservative causes, whose family owns hundreds of discount stores.
Two other grassroots groups have financed ads targeting peoples’ fears that more government involvement would hurt seniors and hasten end-of-life decisions.
One of them, Club for Growth, which advocates lower taxes, is led by president Chris Chocola, a former Republican congressman from Indiana who lost his re-election bid in 2006. Club for Growth this week announced a $1.2 million ad campaign against a health care overhaul, to run in North Dakota, Colorado, Arkansas and Nevada.
The other, 60 Plus Association, is a conservative senior advocacy group that wants to abolish the estate tax. Singer Pat Boone is the group’s national spokesman. Chairman Jim Martin started the group in 1992 with fund-raising help from conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie. It spent $1.5 million on TV ads opposing a healthcare overhaul in the last week.
