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During a town hall in Keene, N.H., Rick Santorum, who is seeking the GOP Presidential nomination, told a mother whose son survived cancer when he was 5 that people with pre-existing conditions — like cancer survivors –should pay more for health care coverage because they make poor health care choices.

I’ve just purchased tickets to see the new movie “Contagion,” about a mysterious virus that spreads with deadly havoc around the globe. But after reading this article by the Los Angeles Times, I’m realizing that the real health horror story is not coming from Hollywood but from Texas.

That is where we’re getting a real-world example of what conservative health care looks like, and what the entire country is likely to experience if conservatives succeed in dismantling health care reform.

The L.A. Times reports on what has happened to the state’s health care system under Gov. Rick Perry:

… [I]n the 11 years the Republican presidential hopeful has been in office, working Texans increasingly have been priced out of private healthcare while the state’s safety net has withered, leaving millions of state residents without medical care.

“Texas just hasn’t proven it can run a health system,” said Dr. C. Bruce Malone III, an orthopedic surgeon and president of the historically conservative Texas Medical Assn. (more…)

Congressman Charlie Bass, R-New Hampshire, voted to end the protections that the new health insurance reform law provides for working Americans, but he retained for himself the benefits he tried to deny to everyone else. Daily Kos, Blue America and other progressive blogs sponsored ads like this one challenging Republican health care hypocrites like him who voted to keep working Americans from getting the same health care they have. There is no excuse for them to accept government-sponsored health insurance while they attempt to repeal protections for everyone else.

Transcript:

Equal protection. It’s the American way.

But when it comes to health care protections, Congressman Charlie Bass thinks he deserves better than you.

Congressman Bass gets affordable health care, with protections against insurance companies cutting him and his family off. No lifetime limits. No annual caps. No preexisting conditions.

But last month Bass voted to deny you and your family these same protections. That’s not equal. That’s not fair.

Even worse, Congressman Bass voted to:

– raise health insurance premiums

– take away prescription drug benefits for seniors

- and deny insurance for sick kids

That will make it tougher for you to get affordable health care.

But don’t worry, Congressman Bass is all set – since his vote didn’t apply to the health plan he gets as a member of Congress.

Call Congressman Charlie Bass and tell him: health care protections that are good enough for Congress should be good enough for ALL of us.

Paid for by Daily Kos and American United for Change. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Dailykos.com and Americansunitedforchange.org

Once upon a time in America, the federal government dictated  both wages and prices in the consumer market.  As a result, American companies resorted to health care benefits (e.g., health insurance premiums) in order to attract prospective employees and to provide an incentive for existing employees to remain in the fold.

But most developed nations today provide health care to their citizens, freeing their business enterprises from that burden, while health insurance premiums continue to be a cost factor for American businesses.  One important way businesses compete is to cut costs, and since we have no national health insurance program other than Medicare and Medicaid, the way American businesses choose to cut costs is to fire employees.

Yet Republicans are insisting that the recently passed health care legislation is a “job killer!” The only aspect of job killing in the current health care law is the lack of a single-payer plan.  If Republicans truly want to plug that hole, all they really need to do is enact such a plan.  Then the only workers getting laid off would be insurance company employees.

Let us not forget that it was a Republican majority in both houses of Congress that created the major part of our deficits.  They are apparently no smarter today.

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Leo Toribio

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Do you have a personal story to tell about how the health insurance reform law, called the Affordable Care Act, has helped you, a family member or a friend?

As Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives plan to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the USW is seeking true, personal stories about how provisions in the legislation have aided families, perhaps by enabling a child with a pre-existing condition to get insurance, a young adult to remain on a parent’s plan, or an elderly parent to better afford prescriptions with the $250 rebate. (more…)

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would add $230 billion to the federal budget deficit over 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the decade after that. Since Speaker Boehner and company didn’t like those numbers – even though they usually praise what CBO has to say – they manufactured their own. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post took apart the Republicans’ fictional arithmetic in an excellent piece you can read here.

Rejecting the CBO’s numbers was yet another example of the astounding double-talk and hypocrisy we’ve heard from the Republicans in their first few days since taking charge of the House on Wednesday. They got elected by campaigning for deficit reduction, but the first thing they did was increase the deficit.

It’s clear that there is no promise the Republicans won’t break, no principle they won’t sacrifice and no fact they won’t ignore in order to let the insurance companies off the hook and strip consumers of important protections like the ban on denying care to people with pre-existing conditions.

The Republicans are trashing the nonpartisan CBO report simply because it’s inconvenient. Instead they cooked up their own numbers about the ACA costing money when it really saves $230 billion in the first 10 years and $1.2 trillion in the second decade.

And the impact of repeal on the federal deficit is only part of the problem. The Republicans insist on calling the ACA “job-killing.” It’s exactly the opposite – it creates jobs. A report out today by Harvard economics professor David Cutler concludes that repeal would destroy 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. Over the next decade, that’s up to 4 million jobs killed by repeal. (more…)

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Instead of the House Republicans breaking their own proposed “CutGo” rule to offset the cost of all spending increases, they have chosen to carve a multi-billion dollar loophole, specifically exempting the $143 billion 10-year cost of repealing health care reform.

By brazenly doing so, House Republican leaders are tacitly admitting that 1) health care reform is deficit reduction, and 2) their claims of fiscal responsibility are completely empty.

Not only is health care reform the equivalent of deficit reduction, health care reform is the only serious path to deficit reduction. The CBO estimates the savings of the Affordable Care Act to be $1 trillion over the next two decades, and many health care experts believe that’s a conservative estimate because the cost-control provisions are inherently experimental.

To exempt heath care reform from a deficit reduction rule is to not have a deficit reduction rule. (more…)

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Robin Hood, the guy who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, wore a short frock and tights. From the get-go, the guy serving the disadvantaged while sporting gay attire would fail the entrance exam required to become a card-carrying Republican.

The GOP is, after all, the anti-gay marriage, anti-repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell crew. More than that, Republicans are anti-working class. Their recent policies and activities show them clobbering the middle class while kissing the wealthy’s, well, you know.

Consider health insurance reform and tax cuts for the rich.

The GOP spent the entire fall election cycle yammering about the federal deficit. The world as we know it was coming to an end because of the deficit, they contended loudly and repeatedly.

Then, immediately after Election Day, Republicans insisted on extending tax cuts for the rich. They added more than $36 billion to that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit in 2011 so that they could pad the pockets of the nation’s millionaires.

To secure that bonus for millionaires, Republicans held hostage extension of unemployment compensation, which during this grave recession, sustains the nation’s workers who are out of jobs and, all too often, also out of foreclosed-on homes.  The deal comes down to this: The average millionaire will be $100,000 richer as a result in 2011. The average worker will get $15,236 in unemployment benefits if jobless the entire year of 2011.

Republicans insisted on giving the rich $84,764 a year more than the poor.

Repealing health insurance reform, as the GOP has said it hopes to do before month’s end, would have the same result – increasing that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit while slamming the poor and middle class.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that the Affordable Care Act will decrease the federal deficit by $140 billion over 10 years. That’s what the GOP wants to repeal – a deficit reduction measure. Republicans want to add $140 billion to the debt.

Most injured by repeal would be the nation’s poor and middle class. That’s because rescinding the law would once again allow insurers to deny health care to children with pre-existing conditions. It would mean the elderly would once again pay more for preventative care and prescriptions.  It would permit insurers to once again withdraw coverage from people when they get sick. It would mean insurers could kick out young adults who are now covered under their parents’ plans until age 26. It would permit insurers to re-impose “lifetime maximums,” so that they could cancel the coverage of people with costly illnesses. It would permit insurers to once again pocket for profit and “administrative expenses” an unlimited percentage of premiums paid by workers and employers. It would mean small businesses would lose tax breaks that will help them pay for health insurance for workers.

The GOP intends to deny tens of millions of uninsured Americans the hope that soon they’ll be able to afford coverage.

Republicans want to, as they put it, “undo” the health insurance benefits that the Affordable Care Act provides to Americans. And they’re offering nothing in return, nothing to help the uninsured, nothing to help the untold millions cheated by insurance corporations, nothing to require premiums to be spent on health care.

That’s the way Republican-hood rolls, protecting the wealthy, pummeling the poor. The rich, in the case of health insurance, are CEOs earning millions while increasing rates in double digits during a recession. The Los Angeles Times reported in August, for example, that the top executives of the nation’s five largest for-profit health insurers pulled down $200 million in compensation in 2009. The poor, in this case, are policy holders who the insurers charged rate increases as high as 39 percent.

House Republicans would exempt their cancelling of health insurance reform from their own rule that new legislation be paid for. So they wouldn’t have to find an additional $14 billion when they attempt to fulfill their campaign pledge to slash $100 billion from domestic programs – that would be from the programs most needed by the nation’s workers – those that help pay for education and transportation, for example. Because these domestic programs are such a small part of the budget, securing $100 billion from them would cost each department approximately 20 percent of its funds this year. That means painful reductions to areas like law enforcement and medical research. This is accompanied by Republican demands for cuts to many workers’ only retirement plan – Social Security.

In the meantime, the main concern of most Americans, as it was in the grueling days of Robin Hood, is jobs. Not the deficit. The GOP offers no plan to increase jobs for formerly working people, to end the suffering of tens of millions of Americans. Republican-hood is, instead, focused on pampering those who don’t need it.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Over the past few hours, the mediasphere has been ablaze with talk that Republicans and their insurance industry backers supposedly won a huge victory with a Virginia court’s ruling that the mandate to buy private insurance is unconstitutional. On the policy merits, this seems to make no sense. At all. In fact, the Republicans pushing this court case may have inadvertently helped America take a progressive step on health care, if progressives can actually take advantage of the situation. Hear me out.

The mandate to buy insurance was always a huge giveaway to the private insurers. It guarantees them a pool of customers that will pad their profits for eternity, thus solidifying private insurance as the profit-taking middleman in the American health care system. The Virginia court, however, struck down the mandate but did not strike down the other mandates forcing the insurers to sell you insurance. For instance, the court ruling did not eliminate the mandate for insurers to sell you insurance despite your preexisting condition; did not eliminate the mandate for insurers to use a certain percentage of their revenues to provide health care services (rather than padding profits); and did not eliminate the mandate that ends lifetime caps on health care benefits.

So, assuming this ruling stands (which, granted, is a big assumption), we have a situation whereby the insurance companies no longer have the state forcing you to buy a private product with no public alternative (ie. a public option), but the insurance companies do have the state forcing them to offer their product to you in a way that doesn’t discriminate against you on the basis of pre-existing condition, and in a way that allows you to buy their product when you want to buy it.

Someone please tell me how this is a bad thing for the progressive cause of cracking down on the insurance industry and empowering health care consumers.

This is exactly why you have the insurance companies freaking out, threatening ever-higher premiums unless they get the mandate they originally rammed through Congress. And like loyal corporate lapdogs, this is why you have the Obama administration – which crafted the original health care bill with the insurers – telling the New York Times that “if (the mandate) eventually falls, related insurance reforms would necessarily collapse with it, most notably the ban on insurer exclusions of applicants with pre-existing health conditions.” It’s a scare campaign aimed at making sure the insurers get their ransom – aka the guaranteed profits and power that come with a customer mandate. (more…)

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

The electorate is bitter and angry. It’s no wonder. Foreclosures rise while Wall Street bankers, whose recklessness caused this grave recession, grab million dollar bonuses. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, but corporations continue to ship jobs overseas.

The level of acrimony showed itself Monday in Lexington, Ky., when a group of men supporting Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul threw a woman backing Democrat Jack Conway to the ground and stomped on her head.

This is not the hope America voted for in the fall of 2008. Now another election is upon us. On Tuesday, voters can choose candidates capitalizing on bitterness, or they can return to hope and provide time for change to play out. Voters can stay the course with the President whose basic philosophy is a Biblical one – that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Or Americans can empower Republicans who believe it’s every man for himself, who espouse the view that a man’s success is his own, and, equally, each man is solely responsible for all of his setbacks.

This midterm election is about how those disparate Republican and Democratic values will play out in legislation. Do Americans want to live in a Republican country that blames individuals for their unemployment in an economy creating only one position for every five jobless workers? Or do Americans want a country that lives by the Democratic philosophy that government must aid, not blame, the unemployed, that it must give a hand up, not a slap in the face, to the suffering?

Hard as it is during troubled times, as difficult as it may feel after some legislative efforts have fallen short of important idealistic goals, let’s build a country of hope, one in which we help our fellow Americans.

That virtuous aim, of course, is the subject of ridicule. Here’s Sarah Palin mocking optimistic Americans at a Tea Bagger event in February, “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

But come out to vote for hope Tuesday anyway; stand up to the malevolent bullies.

What the bullies want is a country where workers are on their own: for health insurance, for income security in their old age, for surviving another Wall Street collapse. For everything.

Unemployment insurance is a good example. Over the past year, the GOP has scorned the jobless, calling them lazy freeloaders. Republicans repeatedly voted against extending unemployment benefits. From the GOP point of view, Wall Street’s crash didn’t cause the economic collapse and high unemployment. No, according to Republicans, each unemployed worker is responsible for his situation, and it’s not the role of government to intervene to help. That philosophy is behind Republican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s comment that the unemployed, like stray animals, should not be fed: “You are facilitating the problem if you give an animal or person ample food supply.”

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to aid the unemployed.

Wall Street reform is another example of Republican “on your own” philosophy. Before the stock market crash of 1929, the unregulated American financial system whipped the economy in wild boom and bust cycles. The frequent crashes and runs on banks were called panics. In Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress imposed rules on Wall Street and the banking industry. For the next sixty years the economy largely avoided panics. Then Congress lifted the regulations, and the crash of 2008 wrecked the economy. Former President Bush responded by proposing and orchestrating the Wall Street bailout. But his party vigorously opposed re-regulation to avoid another economic disaster. The GOP voted against the legislation restoring protections for the economy, investors and consumers. Republicans believe government has no business policing the free market or interceding for investors and consumers because individuals are solely to blame for everything that happens to them.

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to protect hardworking Americans against financial fraud and the machinations of powerful, multi-national financial firms.

Health insurance reform provides one of the clearest examples of Republican “on your own” philosophy. The GOP proposed that “reform” consist of granting individuals small tax breaks, about a quarter the cost of health insurance, while revoking breaks given companies that provide health coverage to workers. This, Republicans said, would “free” companies from providing insurance and “free” individuals to choose their own plans. It would have liberated individuals to negotiate coverage and claims payment with giant, sophisticated, lawyer-laden insurance corporations. If an individual got a bad deal, one that enabled the insurer to drop coverage when he got sick, deny coverage to his sick child or raise rates continuously, well, then, that would be the fault of the individual purchaser. Republicans have promised that if empowered, they will repeal the Democrats’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to support the health insurance reform law that uses the power of government regulation to shield policy holders from insurer abuses, that lowers costs and that enables nearly all Americans to obtain insurance.

Retirees should be “on their own” as well, Republicans believe. Some in the GOP even contend Social Security is unconstitutional. Others want to cut it or privatize it. What privatizing means is getting the government out of the business of collecting Social Security taxes to ensure that all workers receive benefits after retiring. Instead, Republicans want workers to be on their own to invest for their retirement. If there’s another market “panic” – which could happen if Republicans repeal Wall Street reform – and workers lose their “privatized” retirement savings in the crash, the GOP’s response would be that individuals must take responsibility – their loss is their fault.

Come out Tuesday and vote to keep America’s promise to provide basic income security to all elderly citizens. Vote to be your brothers’ and sisters’ keeper and for them to be yours. Vote for hope.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.