Senate Passes Health Care Bill

From Senator Debbie Stabenow;

Nearly 100 years in the making, today the Senate passed comprehensive health care reform by a vote of 60-39. While this bill isn't everything I wanted it to be, it is a groundbreaking piece of legislation that saves lives, saves money, and saves Medicare.

When I first came to the U.S. Senate in 2001, we tried to pass a comprehensive Patient's Bill of Rights, but our efforts were blocked. The bill we passed this morning includes those protections - a "health care bill of rights" that stops insurance company abuses and discrimination. They will no longer be able to deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions, or drop you if you get sick. They also will no longer be able to charge higher rates because of your gender or your occupation, as well as many other protections.

The bill also makes insurance more affordable for American families. Health insurance reform will lower health costs with reforms to improve care coordination, reduce medical errors, and encourage more efficient health plans. Lower health care costs mean more money to invest in businesses, allowing employers to give workers more in take-home wages. It also includes special assistance for small businesses, many of whom are struggling with skyrocketing health insurance rates. This bill creates new tax credits for small businesses to help them pay for the cost of health insurance for their employees. It also provides tax cuts to individuals and families up to 400% of poverty to help them buy health insurance.

It also saves the country money, by reducing the federal deficit and reducing the growth in federal spending on health care.

Finally, this bill saves Medicare. It closes the "doughnut hole" in prescription drug coverage, provides free preventive care for Medicare beneficiaries, and changes the way we pay for health care to reward quality of care, rather than the quantity of tests and procedures. According to non-partisan budget officials, this bill will extend the life of the Medicare trust fund for years to come.

I have posted more details about this plan on my website, at http://stabenow.senate.gov/healthcare. I've included a copy of the bill, detailed summaries about what the bill does, and an interactive feature to explain how this bill closes the gaps in coverage to provide Americans with real health insurance choices.

This has been a long and difficult fight, and while we didn't win every battle, the bill we passed this morning accomplishes the important goals we laid out at the beginning of this debate. It stops unfair practices by insurance companies. It strengthens and protects Medicare for years to come. And it makes health care more affordable for families and small businesses.

The health care fight is far from over. But today we have made extremely important progress on one of the most difficult issues facing our country - an issue that has led to rising costs for our families and businesses and has cost us so many American jobs. 

As we continue this work, and in our efforts early next year to continue to address the jobs crisis, I will remain laser-focused on saving and creating jobs in Michigan. As always, please continue to keep me informed about issues of concern to you and your family. 

Joe Lieberman of 1995 vs Joe Lieberman of 2009

The SEIU (Service Employees International Union) has put together a terrific video on Youtube.com that has shows Joe Lieberman standing against the filibustering that he is now threatening. Watch it here and witness the spectacle of cynical age vs. idealistic youth...what a difference 14 years makes.

Obama in Afghanistan

In addition to being a Democrat and a strong supporter of President Obama, I am also a Vietnam veteran and I have been closely following the news reports of his decision about what to do in Afghanistan. He is scheduled to make his announcement next week, but there are many “leaks” coming from the White House about what his decision will be. It appears that he will be sending more troops, a lot more troops.

There are many reasons we should be disturbed about this, assuming the leaks are accurate. One of the most cogent reasons for concern is that President Obama is sounding more like President Bush with every pronouncement he makes about his reasons for putting American troops in harm’s way. He has been quoted as stating that he will “finish the job,” but cannot tell us exactly what that job is or how he will know it is finished. Until he can give clear guidelines of what he means to accomplish and how he will know when it has been accomplished–in other words, give us a credible exit strategy–he will not receive my support or the support of any veterans who value the lives of our sons and daughters in uniform more than vague hopes of some illusive political gain.

Our soldiers, their families, and our country deserve better than to have yet another president think he can overcome the bitter lessons of history and impose Western democratic ideals on an unwilling nation; that he can win the hearts and minds of a populace by supporting a corrupt government and using our patriotic soldiers as enforcers for that government, or that he can subdue his enemy without injuring our nation.



However, he has not announced his intentions, so perhaps the skies will open and a light from above will shine on him as he announces an end to the fighting. Maybe he will announce that the Afghanis must set up their own government without our troops shedding their blood in the process. Maybe, just maybe, this could happen... But I doubt it.

A Reflection on Veterans Day, November 11, 2009

In 1950, when I was five-years-old and living in a small town in Kentucky, my first contact with anything military happened when my next-door neighbor, Mr. Abbot, gave me a disarmed shell he had brought back with him from World War I. Not long after that, my mother took me to a parade where Mr. Abbot and other old men paraded down the main street of town wearing funny-looking uniforms. Mom told me that the men had been soldiers when they were a lot younger. As I looked around, I saw men take off their hats and put their hands over their hearts as the American flag passed, and I noticed that several of them were crying.

All over the country on that particular day, Mom said, there were parades like this one. It was a special day called Armistice Day. Personally, I was disappointed because I had assumed there would be clowns and animals–maybe even elephants–in the parade. Why else would people be excited about a parade, and why would men cry because a flag passed by?

Jump forward to November 11, 1995. I was standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City with my grown-up son as we watched veterans from all American wars since World War I parade up Fifth Avenue. It took more than an hour for the parade to pass us. There were lines of cars carrying vets who were no longer able to walk. Some groups of veterans had tried, without much success, to organize themselves into discernible marching units. The desert camouflage of the veterans of the recent Gulf War looked peculiar to me, mixed in, as they were, with the solid colors of the uniforms from the other units.

But the groups that affected me the most were the veterans of the war in Vietnam. That was my war, a war that I had tried, unsuccessfully, to put behind me for so long. Tears blurred my eyes as I peered through the telephoto lens of my camera, hoping to spot a familiar face although I knew there was little hope in finding anyone I served with in 1970. Even if I had recognized them, I doubted they would recognize me. The twenty-five years that had passed had changed me from a cynical, sarcastic draftee into a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and expanding paunch. On this day, I stood on the steps of St. Pat’s silently weeping for the all the soldiers who had died in that unnecessary war.

My son put his arm around me and asked if I was okay. I told him that I was, but I didn’t say that I was immeasurably sad when I thought of what my beloved country had lost in that war: all the young men and women who had died, and the millions of veterans who had survived physically but who had never truly “come home.”

On Veterans Day this year, I will once again feel the sorrow of loss, but also a burning anger. When I consider what the warmongers in Washington have done with the lives our sons and daughters in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what these new veterans face when they return home, I am filled with rage. When I think about the impotence of our elected officials of both parties to end this senseless war, and when I hear the drumbeats for starting yet another war in Iran, despair washes over me. Will we never learn?

For most of my fellow citizens, this Veterans Day will pass unobserved as have so many others. But if there is a parade in my hometown on this Veterans Day, and if a five-year-old boy sees an old man with his hand over his heart and tears running down his face as our flag passes by, he might be looking at me.

Open Letter to Dave Camp About His NO On Health Care

Representative Camp, when you voted NO on the House Health Care bill, you once again sided with the health insurance companies in denying Americans their moral right to basic health care. You will have another opportunity to vote again in the final House vote. I hope you will, for once, take into account the number of your constituents who are either without, or struggling to keep, a basic level of health care for themselves and their families, while your corporate sponsors are raking in huge profits. I hope you will think about your constituents who are the working poor, who have jobs that pay no benefits because the companies cannot afford to cover their health care needs. I hope you will think about your constituents who are one hospitalization away from losing all they own. Representative Camp, you will have another opportunity to consider whether your political ideology is more important than your moral obligation to work to benefit all of your constituents. You will have the opportunity to decide what your position of Representative really means: kowtowing to the rich and powerful, or truly representing all of us. The decision is yours, Representative Camp, and we will be watching closely.

Domestic Violence: a pre-existing condition

The SEIU (Service Employees International Union) blog recently posted shocking news. In DC and six other states, insurance companies claim that domestic violence is a pre-existing condition. Including DC, they are Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

In a related survey, half of the national carriers (8 out of 16) claimed domestic violence as a pre-existing condition.

We need health care reform now!

Protecting Michigan's Water

The last remaining investigative newspaper in Michigan, the Traverse City Record-Eagle, has run an editorial that is both scary and hopeful. The scary part is information about some major loopholes in the public trust pacts that treat our lakes and streams as commodities and allow companies to remove unlimited amounts of water so long as it is in containers that hold less than 5.7 gallons of water. You can read the editorial here.

The hopeful part is that various citizens groups and a few elected officials are waking up to the threats. Read the story, then contact your elected officials and alert them to these issues. Remember, without legislative actions to close these loopholes, whenever Nestle's wants to take water from your water table, the courts will have to base their decisions on the law, and the law currently is based on the pacts.

Obama and His Ethical Dilemmas

In the New York Times, on Sunday, August 9, 09, Frank Rich raises some provocative issues about Obama's broken promises and whether or not he is capitulating to the corporate establishment. You can read the article here.

Obama, and any reformer who has political power, faces a difficult moral and ethical quandary: in politics, money always talks. In Western law, corporations are legally considered to be single individuals, and as such retain the rights of individuals to free speech and access to lawmakers so they can influence their opinions and laws in their favor. In the United States, campaign financing has been the accepted form of legal bribery. This is why the efforts of various citizens groups, such as Common Cause, to control and eliminate corporate campaign contributions have always stalled.

Back to Obama's quandary: how will he make fundamental changes when the corporations control the elected officials who ultimately decide on the changes? Obviously, he has to find ways to work with the corporations. The questions are: how many goals do you sacrifice in order to obtain your highest goals? How many concessions to big business do you make before you simply arrive at the status quo that Business prefers?

As Frank Rich points out, in the battle to reform health insurance, almost every Representative and Senator in both parties have accepted large bribes, er, “campaign contributions” from the health insurance industry. Obama, himself, appointed many of the good ol' boys from the financial industry–men who were at least complicit in the financial collapse–in the reconstruction efforts we know as the bail-out and stimulus packages.

Obama is a brilliant men, so he certainly was or is aware of the roles his appointees played in the collapse. Does this make him (Obama) a part of the solution or part of the problem? I believe he is a highly ethical person as well as being a shrewd politician, so I imagine that these thoughts are not new to him. He is also very aware that Jimmy Carter tried to clean up government but without engaging the Establishment, so he had only one term, and the effects of his efforts evaporated almost as soon as he left office.

Bill Clinton found himself in similar positions on a number of issues, however he faced a hostile Republican Congress. The results of his quid-pro-quo were that the country had the largest and longest period of economic growth in recent history, and two major mistakes: NAFTA and the “reform” of welfare that, in fact, broke a well-run system. The middle-class continues to pay the price for both of these mistakes, particularly NAFTA.

Many of us are working hard to support Obama's efforts at health insurance reform. Whatever passes into law will be a major advance. Let's just hope that he does not give the farm away to the corporations in the process.