The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims the following as its health care agenda:
To reignite and sustain economic growth, we must increase access to affordable health care coverage, improve efficiency, and realign the system to focus on keeping people healthy. The Chamber’s health care reform agenda has five main elements:
- Increased Access: Strengthen employer-sponsored health insurance and make it more available—and affordable—to every worker. We support leveling the playing field for individual consumers, families, and small businesses to purchase coverage while protecting the benefits of a uniform federal regulatory system (ERISA).
- Health Information Technology (IT): Promoting and ensuring widespread adoption of interoperable Health IT—including electronic prescriptions and use of computerized systems to store medical records—will improve quality, lower costs, reduce medical errors, and help patients and doctors make better medical decisions.
- Prevention and Wellness: Incentivizing individuals and businesses to live healthier lifestyles could avert 40 million cases of chronic diseases and reduce health care costs by more than $1 trillion (Milken Institute).
- Consumer-Focused Health Care: Congress should make account-based plans more attractive to small businesses by increasing flexibility and improving the transparency of cost and quality data so that Americans can shop smart for the best care.
- Medical Liability Reform: The Chamber supports health courts and other medical liability reforms that ensure fair damage awards, eliminate frivolous lawsuits, and lower the costs of health care in the United States.
Despite this agenda and our governments failure to come any where close to meeting it while in the hands of Kirk and Roskam, the Chamber has chosen to run ads honoring Mark Kirk and Peter Roskam and asks viewers to call them to pat them on the back for a job well done. These ads prove only that the US Chamber should be called out for perpetrating a fraud on Illinois voters.
The only criteria of the US Chamber's own health care agenda met by either Roskam or Kirk, and only if you translate it into meaning doing nothing more than cutting off your right to sue a health care provider who has made a mistake on you or allows it's profit goals to limit your care and you are harmed because of it. I'll leave the details of Peter Roskam's dismal health care record to David over at Rubber Stamp Roskam blog, but I'll go over a few Kirk facts on health care here.
Mark Kirk has received a big fat red F from the American Public Health Association. He also received a Did Not Vote With Us rating from the American Nurses Association earned for his votes for Medicaid cuts and cuts that would limit access to nurses and harm consumers.
Let's go through some of his health care votes:
Kirk voted for Medicare D in one of those late night cheat votes his party became so famous for, when it failed to allow bulk negotiation of drug prices and he failed to vote when adding bulk negotiation to the law came up. Earlier that same day, in fact just minutes before, he voted to force the bill to add a bulk negotiation provision back into committee, so it's pretty clear where his vote would have been had he bothered.
Around the same time as the original Medicare D vote, Kirk voted against allowing the import of more inexpensive drugs. Also around that same time, Kirk voted to waive the tax credit for health insurance purchase for those unemployed due to offshoring in order to allow companies that moved overseas to avoid paying taxes.
In 2004, Kirk voted against requiring newly proposed small business health associations to follow state regulations regarding coverage for breast cancer, pregnancy and childbirth, and well-child OB/GYN services. He voted the same here. States often set standards for minimum coverage that needs to be provided to protect their citizens. Federal preemption provisions like this move health care to the lowest common denominator allowing insurance companies to limit coverage to increase profits.
Also in 2004, Kirk voted against allowing employees to keep the unspent balances in their FSA accounts continuing the requirement that these balances be lost every year.
in 2005, Kirk voted for bankruptcy so-called reform that made it difficult for bankrupts to receive a discharge of medical bills.
Although a major spokesperson for the Iraq War, Kirk was not willing to do much for military or veterans health benefits either. He voted against providing military reservists with the same access to health insurance provided to U.S. military active-duty members. He repeated this vote several times on May 25 and 26, 2005. In 2006, voted against an amendment to National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 that would have expanded access to the military's TRICARE health insurance program to all reservist and National Guard members for a low fee (Roll Call No. 221), and an amendment to the Military Quality of Life and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, 2006 which would have added veterans health care funding for combat-related trauma care to support wounded troops returning to their homes, including medical and prosthetic research (Roll Call No. 224).
In 2006, Kirk voted to allow hospitals to refuse care to poor patients unable to pay Medicaid copays.
The only medical legislation Kirk loves is that which takes away your access to the courts for real harm done to you by a health care provider. Kirk always votes in favor of limiting lawsuits and capping awards (here too). He calls it tort reform.
As far as IT legislation, little has been done in Congress on this point. There was some funding back in 2005, but it fell short of needs. Mark Kirk has provided no leadership on the issue.
None of this to mention his recent misrepresentations regarding the uninsured.
The fact is that Mark Kirk has never been there for us on access to prescription drugs or other health care needs. He's never voted for consumers or flexibility and has done little for small businesses still struggling to insure their workers, those who still try to do that. To Mark Kirk health care is all about limiting liability suits and capping awards for damages to the injured. It's all about insurance company profits and pushing people into HMOs that limit coverage and care.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce should be ashamed of itself for running these false ads on behalf of Mark Kirk touting a health care record that does not exist.
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