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Kirk and Biggert wer not well received

Judging by the response of the crowd in the ballroom their presentation went over like a lead balloon. The venue was great, the Arista Hotel 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 m they'll continue to host open town halls with our representatives in the future. The event was filled to capacity. 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 the 13th congressional district want real health care reform, not what Kirk and Biggert were offering. If the "Medical Rights and Reform Act" they touted 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. 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. That webpage is down because the information is out of date.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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckN5NFmtwYI 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 2002. All to show us how wonderful our health care system is compared to the UK and Canadian systems. While the British and Canadians may have legitimate concerns with their systems the systems themselves bear no relationship to the Democratic proposals for health care reform in this country. HR 3200 will make health insurance companies really compete against each other and the public plan in a open market called 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 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. The CBO has scored HR 3200 unlike Kirk's pretend bill. They say under it 97% of people in America will be insured by 2019. Of that number 96% will be insured by for-profit private insurers and the other 4% will be in the government public option plan. That doesn't sound like the private insurance companies who give you so much money will be "driven out of business" to me Mrs. Biggert. 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. 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 company 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 rightwingers doing across the countryon tv by now. But it was obvious from the reaction that most of the folks there want to see HR 3200 enacted into law. That's what happened yesterday in Naperville. I hope Mrs. Biggert and Mr. Kirk got the message.

Response by markg8 08/13/09 10:11 AM

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