Susan, a 52-year-old mother of two from Indianola, thought she had landed the perfect job. She would be sitting behind a desk in Des Moines after years of working on her feet in retail and even got new benefits like the day off on Christmas Eve. But her excitement ended when her life insurance application was denied because she had Hepatitis C.
Susan is one of 3.5 million Americans living with chronic Hepatitis C, nearly 80 percent of whom are “baby boomers” (born between 1945 and 1965). Susan, like most other baby boomers, was likely infected during a blood transfusion before hospitals screened blood for the virus. The infection can last a lifetime and lead to serious liver problems, including cirrhosis (scarring of the liver) or liver cancer. Many other baby boomers in Iowa only recently discovered that they were infected, either through a routine physical or when they started showing symptoms. A new report by the state Department of Public Health found that reported cases in Iowa have increased by nearly 200 percent since 2000.
Hepatitis C remedies used to involve 6 to 12 months of treatment with cure rates of only 70 percent or less and potentially severe side effects, including anemia, depression, severe rash, nausea, diarrhea, and fatigue. In December 2013, the FDA approved a new specialty drug that revolutionized treatment by preventing the virus from multiplying in the body in 94-97 percent of patients. But this breakthrough came at an exorbitant price: $84,000 for the cure, or $1,000 per pill.
The drug’s cost provoked a backlash. In December 2015, Senator Chuck Grassley released a report investigating the cost of the medication, which revealed that executives decided to charge an excessive price despite the potential to spark outrage. “Let’s not fold to advocacy pressure,” an executive vice president for commercial operations wrote in an internal email, “let’s hold our position whatever competitors do or whatever the headlines.” This strategy proved to be very profitable. Since the drug’s release, the company’s stock has soared.
There is hope for patients covered by Medicare, which most people with Hepatitis C either have or will have soon. The average Medicare recipient paid $5,497 (15 percent of the total cost) in 2015 for the cure. Moreover, charities pay up to $15,000 for patients making less than $58,850 a year as of March 2017 (or $79,650 a year for couples). Nearly 75 percent of Medicare recipients earn less than this amount, meaning that the vast majority qualify for assistance.
Recent reporting, however, indicates that pharmaceuticals companies mostly fund these “independent” charities and receive a tax deduction for their donations. In fact, ten pharmaceutical companies claimed one-sixth of all corporate charity deductions in 2014. Although these kickbacks help cover copays for many patients in need, they also inflate the cost of drugs, leaving the government and people like Susan to pick up the tab.
As a result, Medicare spent more than $7 billion in 2015 on this drug alone – the most for any one drug. I explored how drug companies exploit charities to increase their profits in a paper published last fall.
Congress has considered several solutions for lowering drug cost, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate prices and importing cheaper drugs from Canada. Although he promised action, neither Grassley nor his fellow Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst co-sponsored legislation allowing for the importation of cheaper drugs despite a 2015 showing 72% of Americans in favor. Grassley did support a symbolic vote for importing drugs from Canada, but Ernst did not. Similarly, neither senator sponsored recent legislation that would allow Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.
Moreover, recent congressional proposals seek to increase the deduction that companies can take for charitable donations, which could lead to even higher drug prices. The infusion of dark money following Citizens United means that we cannot know how much money Grassley and Ernst have received from pharmaceutical companies.
Meanwhile, Susan is still waiting for the cure. Her company restricted access to the drug because of its high $1,000 per pill cost. Instead, she will have to wait for years until she qualifies for Medicare.
Milton Friedman famously said that corporate charity is “frequently a cloak for actions that are justified on other grounds.” This cloak threatens the solvency of Medicare and leaves millions of people like Susan in purgatory. By failing to sponsor legislation that would help bring down the cost of drugs like this one and instead supporting legislation that would have the opposite effect, Susan’s senators have left her high and dry.
A little more than two weeks after House Republicans released their alternative to the Affordable Care Act, U.S. Representative Rod Blum (IA-01) announced on Twitter that he will not support the American Health Care Act. According to Blum, the bill “doesn’t do enough to lower premiums for hardworking Americans. I’m a ‘no’ on current version – need to drive down actual costs!” Speaking to The Hill the same day, he added, “We need real competition driving prices down. We don’t need the government telling us what should be in an insurance policy. The government has a role to play. We need to help people who need the help.” Blum had previously said directly and through staff that he was studying the bill.
Like all other House Republicans, Blum has voted multiple times for “Obamacare” repeal bills that would have done nothing “to lower premiums for hardworking Americans,” let alone “drive down actual costs.” However, the stakes are higher now that a GOP-controlled Senate and Republican president might enact new health care legislation. I don’t know what kind of plan Blum is envisioning, but there is no magic wand Congress can wave to “help people who need the help” without the government setting minimum standards for health coverage and regulating the market in other ways.
Representative Steve King (IA-04) was among the first House Republicans to come out against the AHCA. He supports “rip it out by the roots” repeal of “Obamacare” instead. I doubt the amendments unveiled this week to satisfy House conservatives will change his mind. UPDATE: A staffer told the Des Moines Register’s Jason Noble on March 22 that King is “undecided–leaning no” on the bill. SECOND UPDATE: White House spokesperson Sean Spicer announced that King will support the bill. Seeking confirmation. A member of the House whip team told Jonathan Martin of the New York Times that King “went from no to yes in the WH [White House] today after assurances about Senate tweaks.” UPDATE: King released a video statement explaining his decision to support the AHCA. He’s still committed to repealing Obamacare. He hopes Republicans will strip “essential health benefits” out of the bill, paving the way for other measures he wants, like health savings accounts and selling insurance across state lines. He said he told President Donald Trump in a White House meeting today that he worked very hard for total repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but that legislation won’t be brought up this year, because leaders don’t think they can get the votes. He said he had a “firm commitment” from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for a manger’s amendment to strip out “mandates” and “essential health benefits” from the House bill. King views this bill as the “best chance” for the “closest thing” to total repeal of Obamacare in the current political environment. He later tweeted that he and Trump had negotiated “the best possible improvement on ObamaCare Repeal.”
Representative David Young (IA-03) has repeatedly said he is studying the bill and the Congressional Budget Office analysis of its impact. Young’s staff have told constituents this week that he is still undecided. I consider him likely to vote yes if the bill comes to the floor–which may never happen, if leaders conclude they don’t have the votes. For what it’s worth, The Hill’s whip count put Young in the “leaning/likely no” camp because he said on March 15, “I want to make sure it is something that works in the end for all Americans, and that it would pass if it gets over to the Senate.” Several GOP senators have said the AHCA will not pass the upper chamber. UPDATE: Young announced in a March 22 statement, “While the American Health Care Act, legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, is a very good start, it does not yet get it right and therefore I cannot support it in its’ [sic] present form.” I’ve added his whole press release below.
Neither of Iowa’s U.S. senators have clarified how they would vote on the Republican bill. Senator Chuck Grassley has made conflicting statements, telling House members the bill must be changed so that insurance premiums don’t skyrocket for older people not yet eligible for Medicare. On the other hand, Grassley has said Republicans can’t afford to miss what could be their only opportunity to keep six years of promises. Senator Joni Ernst said at town-hall meetings in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines on March 17 that she is studying the AHCA’s potential impact on Iowans and insurance premiums. I hate to break it to her: no alternative plan will magically make cheap insurance widely available while maintaining guaranteed coverage for people for pre-existing conditions and letting children stay on their parents insurance through age 26.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that the Iowa Hospital Association estimates between 200,000 and 250,000 Iowans would lose their insurance coverage under the Republican plan. More on that story below.
The Iowa Hospital Association, which represents 118 hospitals, has estimated through statistical data that between 200,000 and 250,000 Iowa residents will lose coverage. Kirk Norris, president and CEO of the association, said the bill would cause people to lose preventive care coverage, increasing emergency room visits and leading to more costs for hospitals.
“Access through that system that we have today, which is a very strong primary care system led by hospitals, will erode, and it will probably erode substantially first in rural Iowa,” he said. […]
AARP Iowa, which has 380,000 Iowa members age 50 and older, said the bill could jeopardize the Medicaid system, which provides health care coverage to children, low-income individuals, nursing home residents and people with disabilities. Roughly 609,000 people in Iowa receive services from the federal-state program, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency. A little over 154,000 joined in recent years after the state expanded eligibility under the ACA. […]
AARP Iowa spokesman Anthony Carroll said the 2020 changes mean 150,000 Iowa residents could face setbacks — either through reduced services or eligibility. That could also apply to the other Medicaid recipients because of the possible ripple effect of less federal funding. He also said the bill will have negative effects on Medicare, the separate federal health insurance program for people age 65 and older. And there’s concern over the burden on older Americans who may need to spend more to participate in the insurance marketplace.
March 22 press release from Representative David Young:
Iowa Congressman Young Statement on the American Health Care Act
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Iowa Congressman David Young released the following statement regarding the American Health Care Act, legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare:
“While the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare has helped some, it continues to hurt far too many Iowans. It is the reason healthcare continues to be one of the most debated topics in the nation and has been for the past eight years.
Bottom line – we need laws that work for all Americans for all patients – not just some. The ACA was rushed through Congress and to President Obama’s desk which resulted in a failed law that does not work for everyone and a better solution for all patients is needed. And, the problems and costs created by the ACA are only going to get worse with each passing year.
It is a fundamental principle that repeal, reforms and fixes to healthcare are done in the right way, for the right reasons, and in the right amount of time it takes to ensure we avoid the mistakes of the past. We need to be thoughtful and deliberate and get this right to achieve accessible, affordable quality healthcare.
While the American Health Care Act, legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, is a very good start, it does not yet get it right and therefore I cannot support it in its’ present form.
This conversation is not over. And I believe we can achieve a common sense solution that fixes a broken healthcare system so that it works for all patients – not just some. And a solution that makes it affordable for every patient – not just some.
The foundation of healthcare reform must be personalized, patient-centered healthcare that treats patients like human beings, not a number. That puts you and your doctor, and not politicians, in charge of your healthcare. This is achievable –we just are not yet there.”
Video statement by Representative Steve King after his White House meeting on March 22:
Among the U.S. political developments I never would have predicted: the Republican-controlled Congress was unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act under a president ready to sign the bill into law. After canceling a planned floor vote today on the American Health Care Act, House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged, “Obamacare is the law of the land. … We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.”
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. […]
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
Today, Frum reflected on why Republicans were unable to follow through on their promises to repeal Obamacare, even after last November’s victories: “Too many people benefit from the law—and the Republican alternatives thus far offer too little to compensate for the loss of those benefits.”
Representative Steve King (IA-04) came out early against the American Health Care Act but caved this week after the White House promised Senate Republicans would strip “essential health benefits” out of the bill. His grand gesture was for nothing. And what an odd demand to make: letting corporations go back to selling junk insurance to unsuspecting consumers. (As Josh Barro explained here, the unintended consequences of such a policy would be disastrous.)
Several Iowa Republicans in Congress vowed today to keep working on health care reform. I enclose their statements below. Ryan doesn’t seem inclined to put his credibility on the line again anytime soon. Instead, he and Trump will move on to other legislation and hope the Affordable Care Act collapses on its own. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price will do what he can through administrative rules to chip away at Obamacare’s protections.
Nevertheless, today’s political victory should not be understated. Not only will millions of Americans keep their health insurance, Democrats will be better positioned for future battles over Medicare or Social Security. I’m grateful to every Iowan who contacted Blum or Young to tell their Affordable Care Act stories. Your efforts mattered.
Any relevant thoughts are welcome in this thread.
UPDATE: I wasn’t watching the NCAA basketball tournament Friday night, but a friend mentioned seeing a bizarre ad thanking David Young for helping repeal the Affordable Care Act. Timothy Burke has the story and the video at Deadspin. My transcript of the female voice-over:
“Republicans are keeping their promise with a new plan for better health care. More choices and lower costs. Putting doctors and patients in charge again. No more big government penalties or job-killing mandates. New tax credits to make insurance cheaper. And real protections for people with pre-existing Thank Congressman David Young for keeping his promise and replacing the Affordable Care Act with the better health care you deserve.”
The American Action Network PAC is a 501(c)(4) organization created in 2010 “by Norm Coleman, a former Republican senator from Minnesota, and Rob Collins, a former chief of staff to [then] House Minority Whip Eric Cantor.” A leading figure in the American Action Network, Fred Malek, was a founder of the Congressional Leadership Fund super-PAC in 2011.
Reid Epstein reported for the Wall Street Journal on March 23 that the “Congressional Leadership Fund is pulling staff from and closing an office it opened last month in Iowa” to support Young’s 2018 re-election campaign. According to the Open Secrets website, the super-PAC spent $1,843,418 in IA-03 during the 2016 election cycle, entirely on messages opposing Young’s Democratic challenger Jim Mowrer.
An aide to Young said the congressman’s campaign was not aware of any aid being provided by the Congressional Leadership Fund nor any plans by the PAC to withdraw that support. But, he added, Young wouldn’t be swayed by any pressure from political leaders in Washington.
“David Young from day one has said that whoever the speaker is, the majority leader or president, they are not his bosses,” Young aide James Carstensen told The Des Moines Register on Thursday. “His bosses are the people of the 3rd District of Iowa.”
“Republicans have consistently won on the promise of real healthcare reform and the American Health Care Act keeps those promises to the American people,” said NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers.
“Democrats have suffered significant losses in recent election cycles, yet they still refuse to listen to the demands of their constituents. Obamacare is failing and Republicans are determined to replace it – Democrats can either join us or feel the repercussions again in 2018.”
“I’m frustrated because we’ve seen it all before and we said we wouldn’t do it, and we did,” Young said in an interview Saturday.
It all started with a rushed timeline, which gave House members little time to read and comprehend the bill, let alone allow their constituents to discuss it. […]
Then, Young said, he started hearing about secret meetings and backroom deals that changed the bill.
Young was a staffer for Sen. Chuck Grassley when the Affordable Care Act was approved, so he had a front-row seat the last time around. Sure enough, GOP leadership made some of the same mistakes with their replacement bill.
“There were special deals in this bill for New York, for Illinois,” he said. “The rollout was bad, the messaging was bad,” he said.
How disingenuous. While crafting the health care reform bill in 2009, Democrats worked with Republicans including Grassley for months. They made lots of concessions to Republicans. There was no “rushed timeline”–the Affordable Care Act came to a vote in March 2010. Perhaps Grassley was negotiating in good faith for a while, then got scared by tea party activists at his August town-hall meetings. Or perhaps he was just stringing Democrats along from the beginning. Either way, the rise and fall of the AHCA over a three-week period was in no way comparable to Obamacare’s journey through Congress.
Young told Obradovich he wants Republicans to keep trying to replace the Affordable Care Act, but “take the time to do it in a transparent way and air it out and sell it to the American people and not be afraid of that.” He’s not grappling with the real problem: the talking points he’s been repeating for years don’t correspond to reality or lead toward his stated goal of affordable coverage for all.
March 24 press release from Representative Rod Blum:
Congressman Blum’s Statement on Pulling of AHCA
WASHINGTON, DC – “I support the President’s decision to pull the AHCA bill today. Throughout this process, I have been consistent in stating that the main goal of any reform bill must be to make healthcare more affordable for hardworking American families. Unfortunately, the AHCA fell short of that goal, and for that reason I could not support it. I believe Congress should slow down and discuss in an open and transparent manner the best solutions to address the real problem: the unsustainably high cost of healthcare in America. I will always do what I think is right for the citizens of Eastern Iowa, not what the political class in Washington wants me to do — even if that means standing up to my own party.”
March 24 press release from Representative David Young:
Congressman Young’s Statement on American Health Care Act Development
“Too many times in history we have seen leaders make avoidable mistakes. Too many Americans have been suffering under the mistake made seven years ago when Obamacare was rushed through Congress and to President Obama’s desk. It is a failed law that does not work for everyone and the problems and costs created by it are only going to get worse with each passing year.
Great leaders know when to pause a journey down a path that isn’t working and see the opportunity and optimism in starting over.
Bottom line – we need laws that work for all Americans and for all patients – not just some. It is a fundamental principle that repeal, reforms and fixes to our healthcare are done in the right way, for the right reasons, and in the right amount of time it takes to ensure we avoid the mistakes of seven years ago.
I applaud the President, House leadership and my Republican colleagues in taking the bold move to pause and begin anew with a thoughtful and deliberate process that takes the time and input to get this right to achieve accessible, affordable quality healthcare for every American.”
Representative Steve King’s March 24 speech on the House floor:
Tweet by King after cancellation of House vote: “Now then bring to the House floor HR 175, the FULL ObamaCare repeal. Rip it ALL out by the roots!”
Senator Chuck Grassley didn’t release a statement but posted several tweets on today’s news: “House withdrawal of Obamacare repeal will bring attention to Cassidy/Collins Senate bill The2 hv worked real hard to sell it to Reps&Dems”
Followed by: “Lessons learned fr Obamacare failure and House withdrawal of Obamacare repeal:::major social policy change in US must be bipartisan” (Then Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus desperately wanted Grassley’s support for a bipartisan bill.)
And finally, “Failure of Obamacare repeal today will give increased attention to Cassidy/Collins approach to fixing the failure of Obamacare CHECK IT OUT”
Statement released by Senator Joni Ernst:
Along my 99 county tour, I have heard many stories from Iowans facing premium increases, as well as increases in deductibles and copays that they simply cannot afford, all as a result of ObamaCare. While the House did not advance a bill today, we all must continue to work together to promote affordable, patient-centered health care solutions that work for Iowans. As with any reform, we must ensure that it is done thoughtfully and carefully. Making sure Iowans have access to affordable coverage is, and will continue to be, my number one priority […]
UPDATE: Grassley’s office has been sending Iowans this form letter.
March 24, 2017
Dear [name]:
Thank you for taking the time to contact me. I’m glad to have the benefit of your views.
I appreciate hearing your thoughts about the American Health Care Act (AHCA), legislation proposed to replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
A vote on the AHCA was scheduled for March 24th in the House of Representatives but the bill did not have enough votes to pass. It is unclear whether the bill will be brought up for consideration again in the House.
Simply put, the Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, has been a case of over-promise and under-delivery. People were told their premiums would go down, and that if they liked their doctor, hospital or health care plan, they could keep all of it. The reality has been much different. More than half of the country will have two or fewer insurance plans to choose from on exchanges in 2017. Some regions may have no insurance plans available. Even those who were strong supporters of the health care law, like the Minnesota governor, have said that Obamacare “is no longer affordable to many Americans.” In Iowa, premium increases for participants will be 19 percent to 43 percent and many individuals have deductibles and copays so high that it makes their insurance too expensive to use.
The current, ongoing debate on healthcare reform is an opportunity to have robust discussion about how to deliver quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans. It gives Congress the opportunity to address the reasons that 28 million Americans still have no coverage under Obamacare and it forces an important debate about why healthcare costs so much. I believe healthcare reform should rest on a few principles.
First, no one should be disqualified from getting insurance for having a pre-existing condition and there should be no annual or lifetime limits or medical underwriting. If you have children under the age of 26, they should be allowed to stay on your insurance.
Second, any healthcare reform plan has to address the rising cost of healthcare. There is nothing in place to address the underlying causes of the high cost of health care – that is, what it costs for a hospital or doctor to purchase and maintain medical equipment, purchase medicines, carry malpractice insurance, and the like. Lowering the costs of things like those I just listed would drive down the cost of health care, emergency room visits, and health insurance premiums.
Third, healthcare reform has to reestablish states as the main regulators of healthcare. All states have different demographics and healthcare needs and reform must begin with the idea that states know what’s best for their constituents.
I believe these are the principles that Congress needs to follow as we reform our healthcare system. The American people deserve a long-term solution that gives them more choice for less cost, and empowers individuals and states to make their own healthcare decisions.
Thank you again for contacting me. Please keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Chuck Grassley
With the exhausting battles of the 2017 legislative session behind us, Iowa Democrats can turn their attention to the most pressing task ahead. Next year’s gubernatorial election will likely determine whether Republicans retain unchecked power to impose their will on Iowans, or whether some balance returns to the statehouse.
A record number of Democrats may run for governor in 2018. Today Bleeding Heartland begins a series of in-depth looks at the possible contenders.
John Norris moved back to Iowa with his wife Jackie Norris and their three sons last year, after nearly six years in Washington and two in Rome, Italy. He has been touching base with potential supporters for several weeks and expects to decide sometime in May whether to become a candidate for governor. His “concern about the direction the state’s going” is not in question. Rather, Norris is gauging the response he gets from activists and community leaders he has known for many years, and whether he can raise the resources “to make this a go.”
In a lengthy interview earlier this month, Norris discussed the changes he sees in Iowa, the issues he’s most passionate about, and why he has “something significantly different to offer” from others in the field, who largely agree on public policy. The native of Red Oak in Montgomery County (which happens to be Senator Joni Ernst’s home town too) also shared his perspective on why Democrats have lost ground among Iowa’s rural and small-town voters, and what they can do to reverse that trend.
“IT’S JUST SO DIFFERENT AND WRONG IN SO MANY WAYS”
Some things never change, like the ties to family and friends that pulled the Norrises back to their home state, rather than to job opportunities elsewhere. But in other ways, the Iowa they found in 2016 didn’t resemble the state they remembered.
I think the biggest eye-opener for me–and I knew it, and I’d seen it before I left, but when you don’t see it for a while–it’s driving across the state. And I like to go on the back roads when I can. I mean, it’s just, it’s just stark, the contrast of our landscape from even ten years ago, but certainly from longer back than that.
That’s one of my main reasons I started thinking about this [running for governor], is I just–my love for the land and rural Iowa is just, what I wanted my family and our family, my boys to experience. It’s just, it’s just so different and wrong in so many ways. […] That’s the biggest negative I’ve seen since we moved back.
A second motivating factor for Norris: “the politics are certainly more dire than any of us imagined.” He had no idea Republican lawmakers “would be this usurped by outside forces and carry this agenda.”
As Governor Tom Vilsack’s chief of staff for two and a half years, Norris worked with a GOP-controlled legislature. The Republicans running the show now are “much more extreme” than those who regularly discussed policy with some of their Democratic colleagues and people in Vilsack’s office. Today’s Iowa House and Senate leaders are “definitely not engaging the minority party in conversations,” and “there seems to be no evidence even amongst just the majority party of having serious policy discussions.” It’s all about “tactics and running this stuff through.”
A BACKGROUND IN POLITICS AND POLICY
People who build political careers tend to follow one of two professional tracks: campaign operative or policy-maker. I can’t think of any other Iowan with as much experience in both the “hack” and “wonk” camps as Norris.
He did a little work for Tom Harkin’s 1982 re-election campaign for the U.S. House, but his first big political job was as statewide events coordinator for Harkin’s 1984 U.S. Senate race. Norris did quite a bit of fundraising too. He managed Lowell Junkins’s gubernatorial bid for part of the 1986 cycle and continued with that campaign in the lead fundraising role.
Also during the mid-1980s, Norris was state director for the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, which advocated for legislation to help family farmers and other policies to combat the farm crisis. A new job offer followed soon after he attended an organizing meeting for Jesse Jackson at the Greenfield Country Club in Adair County. Being Jackson’s state director for about a year and a half before the 1988 caucuses was a “great experience,” Norris remembers. During that year’s general election, he worked on the Michael Dukakis campaign. (Dukakis carried this state convincingly.)
Shifting gears, Norris bought the old hotel in Greenfield and ran a restaurant in the Adair County seat for four years. He had a vision of restoring the town’s old opera house–a labor of love others took on many years later.
Norris left the restaurant behind to run Harkin’s presidential campaign in Iowa. Some good political trivia: David Plouffe, best known now for managing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2007 and 2008, was the state field director for Harkin’s 1992 effort.
The following year, Norris organized the Farm Aid benefit concert in Ames, with headliners Willie Nelson and Neil Young, then enrolled at the University of Iowa law school on an accelerated program. Completing that degree in two years “felt like a vacation after the restaurant business.”
He had planned to practice law after graduating, but was recruited to run a short-lived U.S. Senate campaign in Oklahoma, then managed Leonard Boswell’s first Congressional race in 1996. Despite getting in just a few weeks before the filing deadline, the then Iowa Senate president won the primary and general elections. Norris moved to Washington to serve as Boswell’s chief of staff.
He declined an offer to run Vilsack’s gubernatorial campaign in 1998, but in the middle of that cycle stepped up to the challenge of becoming Iowa Democratic Party state chair. It was an unenviable position: the party was deeply in debt and hadn’t made the last payroll. “We ended up turning it all around, Vilsack turned it around, we turned the party around and won the governor’s race.”
Norris then helped Vilsack assemble his cabinet and served as the governor’s first chief of staff. Early on, he became aware some people had been meeting to talk about “restructuring Iowa’s electricity market to deregulate at the retail level.” Norris encouraged Vilsack to get involved in those discussions before some bill he didn’t like landed on his desk. The governor wanted to know, “Who did we hire to do energy?” The answer was nobody. Climate change wasn’t a salient issue at the time, nor was ethanol a major factor in the agricultural economy. Norris remembers his boss saying,
“You’ve been telling me you want to do a policy area. There you go.” And so, he called the group and re-formed it as his working group on electric restructuring. And I remember showing up at that first meeting […] it’s highly technical stuff, and I loved it. I loved it. And we steered them away from retail restructuring and really got to the heart of the issue, [which] was the concern about long-term generation capacity for Iowa. And we instead passed the advanced ratemaking principles, which led to all the wind build-out. That and the PTC [wind production tax credit] are the two biggest factors in Iowa being where they’re at in wind today.
About two and a half years into his stint as chief of staff–a typical “burnout level” for that demanding position–an opening came up on the Iowa Utilities Board. Vilsack wanted to appoint Norris, who started preparing for the job.
A change of heart came during a long run one morning. “I couldn’t get running for Congress out of my mind. I just thought it was time, I’d been wanting to. [President George W.] Bush had been in office, and that was motivation as well.” Later that day, Norris met with some Iowa Utilities Board staff and sat in on a telecom hearing. “Paint drying was more exciting.” He walked back up to the governor’s office, where a press release announcing his board appointment was almost ready to go. Instead, he told his colleague he was going to resign and run for Congress.
Norris moved to Ames and “had a great time” running against Representative Tom Latham in 2002, even though that turned out to be a bad cycle for Democratic challengers. (Only two Democratic candidates in the country defeated House GOP incumbents.) The vast, newly-drawn fourth district covered 28 counties from Madison County all the way to the northeast corner of Iowa, a five-hour drive from end to end. Norris is philosophical about losing: “Timing’s a lot in politics.” But he now realizes “I listened to my consultants too much” about what issues to emphasize. How so?
I wanted to talk about economic justice and equity. And I wanted to point out that here’s a guy who cut, voted to eliminate the low-income weatherization program, but yet he and his family had taken millions of dollars in federal payments to subsidize their million-dollar farm operation? So where’s your values here? What are your values? And looking out for the little guy?
“No no no, John, this [election] is going to be on Medicare and Social Security.” You know, a lot of elderly in the district. The problem is, they [Republicans] can muddy the waters on those issues. It’s hard–we have not done a good job of clarifying the philosophical differences on those programs. But I don’t know if it would have turned the race around, but I kind of regret not going with my heart.
Norris raised about $1.2 million for his race against Latham, “which was unheard of” for a challenger in 2002. “So I know what it takes to put the resources together. It takes a lot.”
Both Howard Dean and John Kerry had campaigned for Norris during his Congressional race. Later, Kerry reached out to Norris about running his 2004 Iowa caucus campaign, and Norris agreed. Then, when Kerry launched his presidential bid here, “He told the crowd that Jackie was pregnant before I’d had a chance to tell anybody.”
Wow, awkward! “It was very awkward. He didn’t realize–I mean, he lost the crowd for about five minutes, because they were all–everyone’s looking around to see Jackie.”
Disclosure: I was a volunteer precinct captain for Kerry in 2003 and 2004, when Kerry came from behind to win the caucuses and fell just short in the general election. Kerry gained more than 100,000 more votes here than Al Gore had managed in winning the state four years earlier, but it wasn’t enough to match the surge in Republican turnout for President Bush.
Vilsack had another vacancy to fill on the Iowa Utilities Board in early 2005 and appointed Norris to chair the three-member body. Again Norris immersed himself in energy policy issues. Unlike most state boards and commissions, running the utilities board is a full-time job.
Four years into his six-year term, Norris moved back to Washington following Barack Obama’s election as president. He and Jackie had become influential early Obama supporters after Vilsack abandoned his own presidential ambitions. Obama appointed Norris to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. During the long wait for Senate confirmation (held up by Senator Olympia Snowe “for about seven or eight months for a decision FERC had made five years before”), Norris returned to a familiar role: chief of staff for Vilsack, now U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. “It was great. I enjoyed the year there. I mean, it was kind of like the governor’s office. You’ve got to assemble a cabinet, put a team together, set the agenda.”
Norris spent nearly five years as a federal energy regulator, then relocated to Italy for two years as U.S. Minister-Counselor for Agriculture to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Food Program. He and the family moved back to Des Moines last September, when he became a co-owner of the State Public Policy Group, and Jackie was hired as president and CEO for Goodwill Industries of Central Iowa.
“WE HAVE NOT MADE A COMPELLING ECONOMIC ARGUMENT”
The years Norris was out of state included three devastating elections for Iowa Democrats. How does he explain what happened last year, when the voting patterns of whites with and without college degrees diverged markedly? How can our party’s candidates combat a drumbeat from GOP candidates and conservative media outlets, saying Democratic elites look down on ordinary people and don’t respect their culture or values?
We have to give people a reason. The preservation of their life and opportunity is about expansion and not retracting. And extending rights to the individual.
You know, we have been, as a party, we’ve focused a lot on social justice issues and equal rights, and we should never back away from those. But we have, I think, not made a compelling economic argument. It’s crazy because we have the best, compelling economic argument. But that’s allowed–nor have the Republicans, I mean, there’s no economic future in their economic plans for rural Iowa. It’s, you know, giving tax breaks to large corporations in the urban centers is not helping grow rural Iowa. In fact, it’s complicating their ability to deal with it. Compounding their ability to deal with it.
Why are more rural Iowans voting for politicians whose economic priorities don’t help their communities? In Norris’s view, Republicans
have driven social wedges on social issues to divide folks. And we have not addressed–we’ve just said, well that’s wrong. So we’ve amped up our response on social justice issues. Which, yeah, angers us and we should respond. But we have not responded by saying, folks, your enemy is not Latinos or gays and lesbians. Your enemy is your economic future and the inability to educate your kids and get adequate job training and getting access to good jobs in rural Iowa.
That’s, that’s I think it’s where a lot of that economic anger comes from, that frustration, that fear comes from. And they’ve [Republicans] capitalized on the blame game. And we’ve responded by sticking up for people they’re blaming, which we should. But we haven’t also responded with real programs to help restore their economic opportunity.
And then that gets us into tax policy and our budget policies and the reflections of our priorities, which is what we should be talking about. Because their priorities are–look at where they’re spending the money. And look at who they’re taxing and not taxing.
Folks, that’s what we’ve got to get people to look at. Who really are they trying to help economically. Because until you help them economically, they’re vulnerable to want to blame someone else. That’s human nature. […] Let’s give people, you know, let’s create a fear of “they’re gonna take your guns” so that you forget about the fact that they don’t care about your job.
“A POPULIST MESSAGE OF HOPE AND COOPERATION”
What does Norris think Iowa Democrats could do to improve our candidates’ performance in statewide elections?
Our biggest losses are in the rural part of the state. So we’ve got to address rural Iowa. I mean, we’ve got to address issues in Des Moines and the urban areas in the state too, but you know, as I said in that Starting Line article, if it all erodes around the Des Moines-Ames corridor and the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor, it’ll eventually impact us here too.
So I don’t think we’ve been aggressive enough with answers for how we turn this rural Iowa economy around. And part of it’s because it’s so darn hard. I mean, we have just let our ag industry become something that’s in my mind long-term not sustainable, but that’s not going to be turned around anytime soon. But we can begin to lay the groundwork.
In the meantime, we’ve got to get hope for people living in rural Iowa that we can create economic opportunity for them. And also, make it attractive enough, we’ve got to attract folks to repopulate rural Iowa, small towns.
As Norris mentioned earlier, Republicans don’t have any plans to improve the job market or living standards in rural or small-town areas. The difference is, they have developed a political strategy to compensate for that shortcoming.
I think the last cycle, certainly with [Donald] Trump, maybe a little bit the previous cycle, with Ernst and [Governor Terry] Branstad, they really played to people’s fears, and the least-common denominator. And it was a populist [message] based in hate and anger and racism. We have to have a populist message of hope and cooperation and fighting for the little guy.
And you’ve got to empower folks to have that kind of future in rural Iowa. Education is such a huge piece of it. People aren’t gonna move back to rural Iowa, or rural Iowans aren’t going to be excited about or confident in their kids’ future if we aren’t giving them, returning Iowa to just the best education in this country. That takes resources. That’s a whole tax reform issue discussion. […]
A related challenge is getting “that last mile on high-speed internet, which is the hardest and most expensive mile,” to Iowans outside cities and suburbs. With his partner Bradley Knott, the State Public Policy Group set up a system to give everyone in a Des Moines low-income housing development access to high-speed internet through wifi. Norris believes thinking creatively may reveal opportunities to extend broadband in underserved areas, perhaps using the Iowa Communications Network that has connected public buildings since the 1980s.
Finding new owners for long-established businesses will be another critical part of any revitalization strategy, according to Norris.
Two key elements are education–both as training of the workforce and also for the children of people who want to live in rural Iowa–and access to technology so they can live in rural Iowa and work elsewhere, or bring jobs to rural Iowa.
The other piece I think we have to really focus on is, we’ve talked about the aged farm workforce for some time. We need to talk about aging small business owners who have spent their life building up business equity–not a ton of equity, but that’s kind of like the farmers did, that was their life savings. We’ve got to work to transfer that–to help do tax policies so they can transfer that ownership to new people moving there or people existing there that keeps them there. You help secure their future retirement, but you also help pass on, so it’s really a succession plan for rural Iowa businesses.
Bringing veterans back. I’m talking about welding shops, you know, I’m talking about some hardware stores. We’ve got to focus on the transfer of our small business and our small manufacturing owners to the next generation. We can do that through tax policy.
And certainly the development of new ag products, and some diversification of agriculture in rural Iowa. That’s a harder nut to crack on a large scale, but we’ve got to start.
So I think there are things we can truly do to help reach out to folks, bring people back to rural Iowa. But I don’t think we’re doing any of that well, if at all, now. Certainly not cutting education. We did a lot with the Reinvest in America Act through the USDA with access to broadband, but it’s not done. And that last mile is still a critical piece to figure out the technology.
That’s a great example of what I’m talking about, this populism based on blame and anger. A lot of the good jobs in rural Iowa are working for the schools or county government. Those are livable wages, right? Not great wages, but they are livable wages. They don’t pay enough to attract teachers, but they are livable. So you’ve got either your large farm operations now, or you’ve got another class of people working for minimum wage. And people feeling hopelessness about themselves or their kids’ economic opportunities.
So it was a blame game. It was this, kind of Trump populist anger: well, why are they getting to make so much money?
Having run a restaurant in a small town, Norris knows that if a bunch of public employees get a cut in their take-home pay, “Boom! You’re not selling any hamburgers, or you’re selling hamburgers and not steaks.”
It is so undermining of the future. Is that really the decision you want to send to rural Iowa? […] I mean, some of those entry-level government jobs are just barely livable wages, but they are. And with the benefits, they enable someone to live a good life in rural Iowa. In Iowa in general. But now, we’re going to strip them of that so we can just lower everyone’s [living standards].
It is so backward, but that’s the politics we have to deal with. We have to get folks to realize we can’t turn those folks on each other. They’re all in the same boat.
Cities and county governments are incubators of innovation and new ideas and progressive ideas. What are they doing now? They’re trying to chop off the incubation of progressive ideas by limiting what local governments can do on minimum wage, on plastic bags, you know, on CAFOs [confined animal feeding operations]. And this is the party that claims to be for local government.
But I really think it’s, it’s largely designed to make sure that those new progressive ideas don’t get off the ground. And if you incubate them to success in some counties, it could actually take hold, and we could move this state forward on some really creative and, you know, basic economic progressive ideas and environmental ideas. […]
Their strategy is well thought out, and it’s driving wedges only to benefit the folks who retain control of the powers of government and can vote their taxes in the way they want them.
On a more encouraging note, Norris pointed out that wind turbines being installed in many parts of the state are “injecting a serious amount of new property taxes into those counties.”
Maybe we should be thinking about how to leverage that revenue stream for the next 20 years to invest in some rebuilding communities. So we partner that with state money on education and infrastructure and have an aggressive program to help transfer small business ownership to people there or people moving in.
I don’t have all the answers, but we can begin to change energy development and renewable energy–with solar, and the expansion of wind turbines, and the expansion of solar I think are two other great opportunities to help rebuild the rural economy. You know, each place you’re going to have different pockets of strength, but that’s what you do. Build them one community at a time. We can begin to turn it around.
Long-range, we’ve got to be a better advocate on federal farm policy and change our incentives away from getting more and more out of one acre of land to more and more [into] conservation programs so we can begin to change our rural environment, so it’s a place people are attracted to and want to live.
“WE WANT BUSINESSES TO BE PART OF THE COMMUNITY”
Norris has talked about needing to rein in some of the excessive corporate tax breaks Iowa enacted in recent years. Is he willing to explicitly campaign for governor on that issue? “Absolutely.”
I mentioned that a lot of Democrats are afraid to speak in those terms, because they can easily be portrayed as trying to raise everyone’s taxes.
I think we have to have significant tax reform in the state. And it starts with the rollback of some of those tax credits from the 2013 [commercial property] tax bill that have gone in large numbers to very few. And now we’re seeing the ramifications of that: cuts in education, cuts to the Flood Center at the University of Iowa. That’s a direct result of giving tax breaks to someone who didn’t need it.
This is Branstad 201. In the 80s when he was governor, they did all kinds of tax breaks: property tax breaks, subsidized wages for all these little pop-up factories all over rural Iowa that were great for ribbon-cutting. But the folks who worked there were eligible for public assistance. That’s not economic development. You just drain the public ability to do other positive things for education and infrastructure.
This cycle, they’re not populating rural Iowa with plants, because that’s all–to Trump’s credit–moved overseas. Not to his credit, but he’s right about that. And now it’s going after the high-tech industry, the big industries on the research and development side, giving them huge tax credits. So you’ve got some companies like Rockwell Collins that don’t pay taxes in the state and actually get a check back. That’s, that’s just–wrong.
So, we’re going to talk about [taxes], yes. Which ones to roll back. Simplify Iowa’s tax code. I think Jack Hatch’s book, the tax stuff he talked about is pretty on the mark. Going to four tax brackets. Probably work towards a phase-in of eliminating federal deductibility. I think it’s–we’ve talked about that for years, but we never get it done. […] We’ve got to look at how we phase it over a few years so it just doesn’t drop off a cliff and people can plan for it. And then provide some middle-class tax relief.
Revenues from the next 3/8th of a cent sales tax increase will be directed toward the trust fund. Norris strongly supports passing IWLL, though he’s not convinced “3/8th is even enough to get us on the right path for water quality and soil conservation. But it certainly is a piece of it.”
We’ve got to make sure we can protect that revenue stream for education and not what Branstad wants to do, or wanted to do, is rob that stream [for water quality funding]. And then provide that into middle-income tax relief and advancement in education. Fully funding IWLL. And like I said, I’m still not sure 3/8th is enough. Because you want to do all the parks and rec stuff too which makes us a great place to live. […] And perhaps probably a fertilizer tax or some kind of disincentive for overuse of the cause of our serious water problems. It’s as much in land use as it is in what you do with inputs, which goes back to the farm policy.
It’s all tied together. And that’s why I think this long-term transition in our rural landscape is going to take a while. But it starts with conservation and fully funding IWLL and the water effort.
Ever since IWLL was being debated in the Iowa legislature, I’ve felt uncomfortable with the environmental community promoting a regressive sales tax increase, even with such a worthwhile goal in mind. How would Norris mitigate the impact of that? “Tax reform on the income tax side,” including bumping up the earned income tax credit for people whose wages aren’t high enough for them to pay income taxes.
Regarding Iowa’s Research Activities Credit, under which some large corporations not only pay no taxes, but receive “refunds” from the state, Norris is open to helping new businesses, but not existing ones. More broadly, he wants to move away from the mindset of the state subsidizing businesses directly through the tax code.
Our subsidy–what we should offer new businesses that are in the state and will come to this state: We’re going to subsidize you. We’re going to subsidize you with the best-educated and trained workforce in America. What more do you want?
Bleeding Heartland: And amenities that make people want to live here.
Norris: Exactly. Yeah. Quality environment. Schools you want to raise your kids in. Environment you want to live in and bike ride and go fishing in, you know–and safe water. And access to a workforce you can’t get any better in America. That’s more important to business growth than a ten-year [tax exemption to] relieve the responsibility, the fiscal responsibility to help pay for this community that we all want to support. It’s just–if that’s what it takes to get your business here, maybe that’s not the business we want.
We want businesses to be part of the community. Being a part of the community is so basic to what makes Iowa great, our sense of personal responsibility and accountability. And that means [paying] your fair share and helping support the community, and that means supporting education, supporting our environment, supporting infrastructure. And we’re letting them off the hook. So it’s the wrong incentive.
Returning to the topic of the costly 2013 commercial property tax cut, Norris observed, “Local governments are upset and should be upset when these state decisions are made that hamper their ability to self-govern. There’s just so many things wrong with how we went about that.”
NORRIS’S CASE TO DEMOCRATS–AND TO CONSERVATIVES
Six to ten Iowa Democrats are either running for governor or seriously considering it. I see few policy differences shaping in up a primary race where everyone wants to raise wages for working people, better support public education, restore state funding to Planned Parenthood, and so on. How does Norris see himself standing out? What could he bring to the table that other Democrats don’t?
Experience. I mean, I’ve put together cabinets before with a governor. Run the state with a governor. Put together a cabinet at USDA. I’ve been chairman of the [Iowa] utilities board, and an energy commissioner [for the federal government]. What I liked the most about those two jobs–utilities board and energy commissioner–is you have to make raw policy decisions. Stuff has to work at the end of the day. You’ve got a little thing called Ohm’s law, you know? At the end of the day, the grid has to function, right? So it keeps you honest.
So I think I have a depth of policy development experience and understand how you process those, how you make good policy decisions, because I’ve made a number of them.
So one is, a different set of life experiences. I own my own business now, I’ve owned my own business before and had a business in rural Iowa. So I have, I think, a real connection to the small business community, which I think is key for Iowa’s future.
My kids are in public school in Iowa. I came from public school. I think, I don’t know how much that differentiates me, but my wife was a public school teacher. Serious commitment to public education. […]
Significant life experience. I hope a little wisdom with my engagement in a number of things in politics, policy, government, business over the years, so I think I bring some of that to the table. I have gray hair. Gray like Bernie [Sanders].
The “wisdom and a set of life experiences” Norris says he can bring to the job equip him “to put together a government and change. We’ve got some big problems. This isn’t just about winning an election. It’s about changing the course of this state. That’s a big task.”
If he runs, Norris won’t be the only candidate from rural Iowa, and he was careful not to discount anyone else’s “love for the land or passion for the state.” “But no one has more,” he added. “And I want to make that a defining part of my candidacy: that land ethic Aldo Leopold tried to define. That’s part of my mission.”
A few minutes later, Norris recalled his track record of raising almost $1.2 million as a Congressional challenger in 2002. “I have a lot of folks all over the country who are interested in supporting me, so I think I’ll have the capacity to put the resources together. Perhaps more so than some others–maybe not Andy [McGuire], if she self-funds–but more so than someone who hasn’t put together a national network of fundraising before. And we all know it’s going to take resources to win this thing.”
Norris will argue he has the capacity to be a strong candidate and to do the job if elected governor.
Suppose he becomes the 2018 nominee. How would he win over Iowans who aren’t Democrats?
I’ve spent almost my whole life in Iowa. I think Iowans are generally conservative, but they’re not conservative in the way that has been reflected in the last few years. [They’re] conservative like my grandfather, you know? He built his house from scrap lumber that he tore down from the last house, you know? And frugal. You know, we’re conservative in that way. […]
I like the kind of conservative that I think about Iowa. But now we’ve got this notion of conservatism that’s more about, about limiting other people from being part of our community. I don’t think that’s where Iowans’ hearts are at. If we talk to them about conservative values based on protecting the land and being you know, community-based, caring about your neighbor. I think the Democrats can [connect] with the conservatives more so than the folks that want to let CAFOs build next to your house, or let someone else pollute your water, or let someone not pay their fair share. Because those aren’t conservative values, the conservative values I sense in Iowans. […]
My campaign will live or die on that fundamental appeal to return Iowans to what I really think they are, and create the opportunities for them based on those conservative values. And I think land, and conservation is to me a conservative word and has a conservative meaning. It’s treating the land with respect and passing on to the next generation better than you found it. That’s something we as Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to really run on.
Norris sees the new collective bargaining law as an example of Iowa Republicans rejecting traditional conservative values. Local governments, school districts, and public employees are now bound by state regulation “of what people can and can’t do,” as opposed to the decades-long tradition of “a negotiated business transaction” with “the right for people to self-determine their outcome.”
HILLARY OR BERNIE?
Safely ensconced in Italy during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, Norris never went on the record as a supporter of either Sanders or Hillary Clinton throughout the divisive presidential primaries. Reflecting on that choice now, where would he have landed? “That would have been a tough one for me. I’m taking the easy way out here.”
I warned him that if he’s campaigning around the state, people will ask, “Were you for Hillary or Bernie?”
I think of that in my argument for myself. I think the argument for Hillary was, she is experienced, and that is valuable. And I’m kind of making that argument for myself.
But I think she missed the mark on what people were looking for, and I don’t think I’m going to miss that mark. I’m just too rooted in kind of a populist progressive roots that I’m not scared to talk about.
So I thought Bernie brought that to the race. The real kind of fight, what this is about, to the race, that excited people. So it would have been a tough choice for me had I been here for the caucuses. One’s kind of a straightforward, rational argument for experience, and one is that, “This is wrong. We’ve gotta fight to correct it.” Unfortunately they came in two packages instead of one. If we’d had them in one package we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this.
How would Norris respond to the idea that a woman in politics who presented like Sanders (shouting, talking about revolution) would not have struck such a favorable chord with voters?
She didn’t have to present like Bernie. But you didn’t sense that it was in her gut. You know, you just–have a heart. I think–I just, I don’t think she answered those fears out there of folks in a positive way. Government can help you, as opposed to government’s your enemy. And the people you don’t look like need–we’re all in this together, versus, it’s their fault.
Trump, I think Trump won on, like I said, populism based on hate and anger. We saw it in the 80s with the farm crisis, with the group that got really into anti-Semitism. They were getting off the ground in Iowa. And there was a lot of that. And there was that fear of losing their farm, and some folks wanted to blame somebody. We tried to give them hope through intervention with counseling and legislation–the ways you go about positive change to change the equation. That’s the same type of two different kinds of populism I saw in this last race.
The second-biggest factor was, I think there was still–I think Obama capitalized on some of that with the hope and the change message. But people–they didn’t change for a lot of people. I don’t think our politics changed. Policies changed. Health care policy–great. Some policies changed, some on climate change. But the politics didn’t change for people. They didn’t feel any more empowered than they did eight years before. […] So I think Trump had a different change message, like I said, based on that blame and anger. But unfortunately, we didn’t respond.
Before Memorial Day, Norris will likely confirm whether he is committed to taking a “populist message of hope and cooperation and fighting for the little guy” to Iowa voters. But first, the Democrat with a deep love for Iowa’s land must decide how ambitious to be in the garden he had tilled shortly before our interview. “I’m gonna reassess what I’m planting if I’m going to be busy campaigning.”
Iowa’s Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst say they are “continuing to carefully look through the revised health care discussion draft” released by Senate Republican leaders last week. Iowans who have called the senators’ offices are likewise hearing from staffers that Grassley and Ernst have not decided whether to support the GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
I suspect Iowa’s senators would rubber-stamp any GOP “health care” bill Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brings to the floor, for several reasons:
• Neither Grassley nor Ernst made time to meet with Iowa hospital leaders who lobbied against the bill on a trip to Washington last week.
• Neither Grassley nor Ernst has bucked the party line on any important Senate vote that I can recall.
For now, let’s take Iowa’s senators at their word: they are still undecided and seeking input from constituents. If Grassley and Ernst intend to keep promises they’ve been making on health care policy, they need not spend any more time deliberating. They have ample reasons to vote against the Orwellian-named Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA).
Non-partisan analysis indicates that if this bill becomes law, tens of millions of Americans–including hundreds of thousands of Iowans–will have worse health insurance coverage or no coverage at all.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) released the official cost estimate of the BRCA on June 26. Click here to read the whole horror show. Key points:
HIGHER PREMIUMS AND DEDUCTIBLES, ESPECIALLY FOR OLDER IOWANS
Grassley has repeatedly said (most recently in a form letter going out to Iowans this month) that health care policy should provide “more choice for less cost.” He told reporters in March that he was especially concerned about projected insurance premium increases for late middle-aged people.
Ernst has similarly told the public, “Iowans deserve affordable health care coverage that meets individuals’ and families’ needs.”
The C.B.O. estimates that average gross premiums would initially rise under the Senate bill, then drop by about 20 percent, compared with what it would be under the current law, in 2026.
This would largely be achieved by offering skimpier plans with higher deductibles, and by pricing the old and the sick out of the insurance market.
The Senate bill would make financial assistance for premiums less generous than under the current law. That means that average deductibles for the plans would be much higher. For many low- and middle-income Americans who currently receive subsidies, their share of premiums would rise.
The CBO score shows particularly large cost increases for people over 50, who (as under the House Republican bill) could be charged five times as much as younger Americans for health insurance. For example, a 64-year-old earning $56,800 a year would go from paying $6,800 per year for health insurance under current law to $20,500 annually under the Senate Republican bill.
A 21-year-old earning $26,500 per year would pay about $500 more annually for a “silver” health insurance plan under the BCRA. A 40-year-old with the same income would pay about $1,300 more per year, but a 64-year-old would pay $4,800 more ($6,500 annually under the Senate bill, compared to $1,700 under the Affordable Care Act).
The CBO estimated that 22 million fewer Americans would have health insurance in 2026 under the Senate Republican bill, compared to current law. People between the ages of 50 and 64 would represent a large share of the uninsured, but there would be big losses in all age groups.
FEWER IOWANS COVERED BY MEDICAID
Like the bill House Republicans approved, the BCRA would fundamentally change Medicaid, with devastating consequences for people with lower incomes, people with disabilities, and those in nursing homes. Dylan Matthews explained at Vox,
The BCRA would effectively end the Medicaid expansion starting in 2021. Under current law, the federal government initially paid 100 percent of costs of Medicaid expansion beneficiaries, a percentage set to wind down to 90 percent in 2020 and stay at that level permanently. Under the Senate bill, the federal government would gradually wind down that percentage to the states’ normal matching rates for Medicaid — rates that are as low as 50 percent in certain states. […]
Replacing Medicaid expansion for poor people are new tax credits that are much less generous than those under current law. Under Obamacare, tax credits were tethered to the cost of plans covering 70 percent of medical expenses. The BCRA would reduce that amount to plans that cover 58 percent. That means higher deductibles, copayments, and other means of cost sharing to make up for lower premiums than a more generous plan would have.
That’s particularly bad news for the people being kicked off Medicaid, who would get tax credits but would be forced to use them to buy coverage that could cost them thousands of additional dollars per year. Medicaid, by contrast, has minimal or no premiums, deductibles, or copays, depending on the state. […]
Moreover, the changes to credits are also bad news for low-income people already on the exchanges, who would get smaller credits for worse coverage.
The CBO expects that because of these issues, few low-income people will even bother to use the tax credits to buy insurance. “The deductible for a plan with an actuarial value of 58 percent would be a significantly higher percentage of income,” the office writes. “As a result, despite being eligible for premium tax credits, few low-income people would purchase any plan, CBO and JCT estimate.”
Under the Senate bill, the federal share of expenditures for expansion adults would fall from the current 90 percent to 85 percent in 2021, 80 percent in 2022, 75 percent in 2023, and then to states’ standard Medicaid matching rates (which average 57 percent across all states) in 2024. By 2024, states that wanted to continue covering low-income adults in expanded Medicaid coverage would have to pay 2.8 to 5 times their current-law cost for each enrollee. […]
On top of that, the Senate plan — like the House bill — would impose a per capita cap on Medicaid, including the Medicaid expansion, and would limit growth in federal funding per beneficiary even more severely than the House plan, shifting additional expansion costs to states. These two policies combined would starve states of the federal resources needed to continue covering low-income adults. […]
Few states could generate the extra funding needed to keep their expansions going — by raising taxes or cutting other parts of their budgets, like education — since the federal cuts, and required state increases, would rise each year. Thus, even non-trigger states would likely end their expansions in 2021 or soon after. The 11 million low-income adults covered by the Medicaid expansion who would have been ineligible for Medicaid, and likely uninsured, under pre-ACA rules would be in severe jeopardy of once again going without quality, affordable health coverage.
The CBO projects that federal spending on Medicaid would drop by $772 billion over the next decade, compared to $880 billion in the House bill. But paradoxically, the CBO anticipates that coverage losses would be even higher under the Senate bill (15 million fewer covered by Medicaid in 2026) than under the House bill (14 million fewer covered by Medicaid in 2026).
Probably the most important danger with the AHCA per-capita cap is the “demographic time bomb.” The population is aging, in Iowa and throughout the country. As the Baby Boomer bubble works its way through the elderly population, seniors will become older on average. The share of Iowa’s seniors who are age 75 or older is expected to rise from 42.6 percent in 2020 to 47.3 percent by 2030, and then 55.7 percent by 2040.[9] This is significant because Medicaid spending per capita is much higher for the “old old” than for the “young old.” Average Medicaid spending per recipient for those age 85 or older is 2.5 times the amount spent per recipient age 65 to 74.[10]
Growth in the per capita Medicaid reimbursement for the elderly population will be based forever on Iowa’s level of spending for all seniors as of 2016, before the boom in Medicaid’s aging population. The rising cost of Medicaid for seniors, as they become on average older and sicker, will not be matched by the federal government. That will stick the state of Iowa with higher costs, cause cuts in benefits to seniors, or both. One program that could very well end up on the chopping block is in-home health care, an important program that allows seniors to receive needed services while remaining at home, rather than in a nursing home, which is more expensive.
None of this is a fluke, or an unintended consequence of the AHCA. To the proponents, it is a measure of the success of that legislation — to shift costs and risk from the federal government to the states, health-care providers, and to the low-income populations served by Medicaid. The states will have to make the hard choices — who gets served, who gets cut. The elderly and the sick will suffer the consequences.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that it would become 53 percent more expensive for Iowa to maintain our state’s version of the Medicaid expansion under the Senate bill. Almost certainly, our state budget could not afford that extra expense. Rolling back Medicaid expansion here would leave around 148,000 people without coverage.
Medicaid pays for most of the 1.4 million people in nursing homes, like Ms. Jacobs. It covers 20 percent of all Americans and 40 percent of poor adults. […]
Under federal law, state Medicaid programs are required to cover nursing home care. But state officials decide how much to pay facilities, and states under budgetary pressure could decrease the amount they are willing to pay or restrict eligibility for coverage.
“The states are going to make it harder to qualify medically for needing nursing home care,” predicted Toby S. Edelman, a senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy. “They’d have to be more disabled before they qualify for Medicaid assistance.” […]
While most Medicaid enrollees are children, pregnant women and nonelderly adults, long-term services such as nursing homes account for 42 percent of all Medicaid spending — even though only 6 percent of Medicaid enrollees use them.
“Moms and kids aren’t where the money is,” said Damon Terzaghi, a senior director at the National Association of States United for Aging and Disabilities, a group representing state agencies that manage programs for these populations or advocate on their behalf. “If you’re going to cut that much money out, it’s going to be coming from older people and people with disabilities.”
On June 23, Ernst told Iowa reporters, “I think we do need some changes in Medicaid,” adding, “We want to make sure they have access to health care. We want to make sure they have access to quality health care.” In a form letter to Iowans who contacted Grassley’s office recently about health care, the senator says,
health care reform has to reestablish states as the main regulators of health care. All states have different demographics and healthcare needs and reform must begin with the idea that states know what’s best for their constituents. This principle also applies to Medicaid. In general, I prefer allowing states to have the option to manage Medicaid as they know best what the residents of their state need and I will work to preserve Medicaid for the most vulnerable in our society.
If Grassley and Ernst are truly concerned with preserving “access to quality health care” for “the most vulnerable in our society,” they should rule out voting for the BCRA.
NO GUARANTEE OF INDIVIDUAL HEALTH INSURANCE OPTIONS
Nongroup coverage. On net, CBO and JCT estimate that roughly 7 million fewer people would obtain coverage in 2018 through the nongroup market under this legislation than under current law; that figure would be about 9 million in 2020 and about 7 million in 2026 (see Table 4, at the end of this document). Fewer people would enroll in the nongroup market mainly because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated and, starting in 2020, because the average subsidy for coverage in that market would be substantially lower for most people currently eligible for subsidies—and for some people that subsidy would be eliminated.
Market Stability. In CBO and JCT’s assessment, a small fraction of the population resides in areas in which—because of this legislation, for at least for some of the years after 2019—no insurers would participate in the nongroup market or insurance would be offered only with very high premiums. In the first case, the elimination of cost-sharing subsidies for low-income people and the greater share of income that older people pay toward premiums would shrink the demand for insurance compared with that under current law, and it would probably not be profitable for insurers to bear the fixed costs of operating in some markets. In the second case, because the total subsidy per person under the legislation would be substantially smaller than under current law, the fraction of purchasers who are subsidized would fall. Among the unsubsidized population, less healthy people are more likely to purchase insurance—and the higher costs for them would put upward pressure on premiums. As unsubsidized people became a greater fraction of the purchasers, that pressure would be greater and could result in very high premiums in some markets—mainly during the second half of the coming decade, when much less federal funding would be provided to reduce premiums.
DIRE CONSEQUENCES FOR HOSPITALS
Kirk Norris of the Iowa Hospital Association has flagged other problems with the Senate health care bill. From the latest Des Moines Register story by Tony Leys:
Norris said rural hospitals tend to be the most dependent on Medicaid, which covers 10 percent to 20 percent of their patients. If Medicaid is cut as much as predicted, he said, small hospitals are likely to drop money-losing services, starting with mental-health and addiction-treatment programs.
“If you think we have a behavioral health service shortage now, just wait,” Norris said in an interview.
Norris said he doesn’t understand who would benefit from the bill. There has been a dearth of vocal defenders, outside of the members of Congress touting it, he said. “I haven’t heard anybody say they support this bill,” he said. “Not anybody.”
Contact information for all the Grassley and Ernst offices can be found at the end of this post. Although I’m not optimistic they will listen to feedback from constituents, a phone call is still worth a few minutes of your time. Iowa’s senators may jump on the bandwagon of opponents if they sense leaders can’t get to 50 votes on this terrible bill.
I will update this post as needed.
UPDATE: Senate GOP leaders were unable to get 50 members to support a motion to proceed to debating the bill on June 27, meaning the legislation will not be brought to the Senate floor until after the July 4 recess.
Every delay is good news.
Worth noting: neither Grassley nor Ernst were named in reports listing reluctant GOP senators. They missed an opportunity to be seen standing up for their constituents.
Speaking of which, some Republican governors are speaking out against this bill, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, and John Kasich of Ohio.
Hours before Senate Republicans delayed a vote on the bill, Mr. Kasich denounced his own party’s legislation in biting terms, saying that it would victimize the poor and mentally ill, and redirect tax money “to people who are already very wealthy.”
“This bill,” Mr. Kasich said, “is unacceptable.” […]
John Weaver, Mr. Kasich’s chief political adviser, said Mr. Kasich had spoken recently with other Republican governors, including Mr. Snyder, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Larry Hogan of Maryland, who have publicly criticized the Senate proposal. “He has worked it on the phone,” Mr. Weaver said of Mr. Kasich. “There are a number of Republican governors who he spoke to and didn’t want to sign the letter, but came out on our position.”
“They think that’s great? That’s good public policy?” an incredulous Kasich said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. “What, are you kidding me?” […]
Kasich urged Portman not to support the bill even if McConnell agrees to beef up funding for opioid treatment, because that would not be enough to make up for the GOP bill’s proposed cuts to federal Medicaid funding.
“I told him if they hand you a few billion dollars on opioids … that’s like spitting in the ocean,” Kasich said. “I’ve talked to Rob a million times. He knows exactly what my concerns are.” […]
Kasich said congressional Republicans should try getting their own health care through Medicaid or purchasing insurance with the miserly subsidies the GOP plan offers.
“Why don’t we have those folks go and live under … Medicaid for a while?” Kasich said. “Why don’t we have them go live on their exchange where they can get two, three, four thousand dollars a year to cover their health care exchange costs.”
Too bad Governor Kim Reynolds either lacks political courage or doesn’t understand the implications of the policies under consideration.
Grassley says he’s getting many hundreds of email, calls and letters from Iowans about the legislation. “I’m still continuing to study this 144-page draft bill over the next few days and I hope we make a decision this week,” Grassley says, “but if we don’t, then I’m going to have another couple weeks to study the 144-page bill.” […]
While many Iowans are pleading with their senators to leave the ACA intact, Grassley says action is needed to correct problems that were created by the earlier health care plan. “Currently, if nothing is passed, 72,000 Iowans on Obamacare will face hardship keeping their insurance this fall,” Grassley says. “You know, 94 or 95 counties only have one, Medica. If it stays in Iowa, they’re going to have increases in premiums of 43-and-a-half percent.”
While Grassley hasn’t said how he’d vote on the Senate version of the bill, he is convinced the ACA needs to be repealed and replaced, he’s just not sure yet if this is the best way to do it.
As I mentioned near the beginning of this post, no one following this debate closely believes that Grassley or Ernst might not vote for the Republican bill, depending on its provisions. Senate leaders aren’t offering concessions to Iowa’s senators, nor do any Congressional correspondents consider Grassley or Ernst as a questionable supporter. The latest example: Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis named fourteen GOP senators–not including Grassley or Ernst–as the “toughest” GOP votes to get for the BCRA.
THIRD UPDATE: Here is the latest version of Grassley’s form letter to Iowans who contact his office about the health care bill. Note that he is still referring to the name of the House-approved bill (AHCA) rather than the bill that will come up in the Senate.
Much of the text is identical to what Grassley was telling Iowans earlier this month, but the new version includes several paragraphs underscoring the senator’s alleged commitment to Medicare and Medicaid.
Senator Chuck Grassley’s response to my concerns on the current version of AHCA (Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017) (BCRA) under consideration by the U.S. Senate:
June 27, 2017
Dear [name]:
Thank you for taking the time to contact me. As your Senator it is important for me to hear from you.
I appreciate hearing your thoughts about the American Health Care Act (AHCA), legislation proposed to replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
The AHCA passed the House of Representatives on May 4, and the bill is now under consideration in the Senate. Under the budget reconciliation process, the House had to act first. The passage of the AHCA in the House now gives the Senate the opportunity to repair the damage that Obamacare has caused. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), isn’t working as time passes and its structural deficiencies are revealed. In Iowa, premiums were 19 percent to 43 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 2016 and many individuals continue to have deductibles and copays so high that it makes their insurance too expensive to use. And now, many Iowans who have Obamacare will have no options for or access to health insurance in 2018. Nationwide, 32 percent of counties in the United States will have just one insurer offering plans on the exchanges. In the Senate, a health care bill will need the support of at least 51 senators to pass. I’d like to see bipartisan support for a bill. I have been talking with patient advocates and insurers in Iowa, as well as the Iowa insurance commissioner and the governor’s office, about all of the considerations to take into account. Their insight is important as the Senate works on a bill that helps make health care more affordable and more accessible for Iowans and other Americans.
As the Senate continues its work on health care reform, I believe that there are a few principles that should guide our work.
First, no one should be disqualified from getting insurance for having a pre-existing condition. If you have children under the age of 26, they should be allowed to stay on your insurance.
Second, any health care reform plan has to address the rising cost of healthcare. There is nothing in place to address the underlying causes of the high cost of health care – that is, what it costs for a hospital or doctor to purchase and maintain medical equipment, purchase medicines, carry malpractice insurance, and the like. Lowering the costs of things like those I just listed would drive down the cost of health care, emergency room visits, and health insurance premiums.
Third, health care reform has to reestablish states as the main regulators of health care. All states have different demographics and healthcare needs and reform must begin with the idea that states know what’s best for their constituents. This principle also applies to Medicaid. In general, I prefer allowing states to have the option to manage Medicaid as they know best what the residents of their state need and I will work to preserve Medicaid for the most vulnerable in our society.
In 2015, America celebrated the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid. These programs have served older Americans and those in need admirably for over 50 years. During my time in the Senate, I have worked to preserve and strengthen these programs so that they can continue serving Americans now and in the future.
I worked to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid by providing government the tools to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. I authored the 1986 updates to the False Claims Act as well as an update to the law in 2009. Since 2009, the False Claims Act has recovered $31.3 billion and $19.3 billion of that total has been in Medicare, Medicaid and other health care programs. The law has become the government’s most effective tool for fighting health care fraud.
I worked to help families raising children with disabilities when I coauthored bipartisan legislation creating Katie Beckett waivers. These waivers, named for an Iowan, improved the Medicaid program by allowing the families of children with disabilities to buy into Medicaid coverage without having to quit their jobs and impoverish themselves.
Moving forward, I am working to enact legislation that will give Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance program flexibility to better coordinate the medical care of children with medically complex conditions.
As a strong supporter of Medicare and Medicaid and as someone who cares about those who will count on these programs today and for many years to come, I have a responsibility to ensure the survival of these programs for future generations.
To ensure that we make these programs as strong as ever, we must recognize the current fiscal path of both programs jeopardizes the program for beneficiaries today and in the future, along with their unsustainable impact on the overall federal budget.
In 2016, 77 million will be enrolled in Medicaid. These numbers will continue to grow in the coming years as will the amount of money that the government will spend. Many states are having budget problems due to the growth of their Medicaid programs and mandates from the federal government. If we are serious about saving these programs, we need to have an honest and bipartisan discussion about reform now.
I am willing to engage in serious conversation in the hope that we can build the bipartisan consensus we need to succeed in the 115th Congress.
I believe these are the principles that Congress needs to follow as we reform our health care system. The American people deserve a long-term solution that gives them more choice for less cost, and empowers individuals and states to make their own health care decisions.
Thank you again for contacting me. Please keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Chuck Grassley
An Iowan with in-depth knowledge of the health care sector looks at lesser-known benefits that could be lost if Congress replaces the Affordable Care Act. -promoted by desmoinesdem
The debate on Republican efforts to repeal and replace the 2010 health care reform law has focused on the provision of health care and the repeal of some taxes. In particular, attention has been directed at the effort to reduce Medicaid coverage.
What isn’t being discussed: the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included many provisions aimed at addressing serious issues in the health care system, such as quality, safety, and workforce shortages. None of those can be found in the House-approved American Health Care Act (AHCA) or the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), proposed by Senate Republican leaders.
So, in addition to reducing (or eliminating) coverage for poor people and individuals with illnesses, the Republican bill would be a step backward in terms of efforts to improve the health care system, which accounts for 17 percent of our gross domestic product.
To review, the main provisions of the ACA were the expansion of the Medicaid program, the “individual mandate” (the requirement that everyone have health insurance), the requirement that employers of more than 50 people offer employee health insurance, and the subsidy that helped low-income people purchase insurance through the health care exchange.
The “individual mandate” was critical because it meant that the pool of insured would include everyone, so the cost of premiums could be spread across the population that included young and healthy people, as well as people with pre-existing conditions, people at risk of illness, and people in poor health. The ACA required insurance plans to cover people with pre-existing conditions and allowed children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26.
In addition, insurance plans could not be offered unless they covered ten essential services: 1) ambulatory services; 2) prescription drugs; 3) emergency care; 4) mental health services; 5) hospitalization; 6) rehabilitative and habilitative services; 7) preventive and wellness services; 8) laboratory services; 9) pediatric care; and 10) maternity and newborn care.
The AHCA, which House Republicans passed in May, does not assure coverage for any of these services and does not protect people with pre-existing conditions. Perhaps of most concern to people who consider the health care system flawed, the AHCA does not contain any measures that will evaluate or improve the current system.
In contrast, the ACA, in Title III, “Improving the Quality and Efficiency of Health Care,” required the establishment of a national strategy to improve health care delivery, patient outcomes and population health. It established a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to research, develop, test, and expand innovative patient care options. It established study groups and demonstration projects aimed at improving access to rural health care, and supporting small rural hospitals.
Title IV, “Prevention of Chronic Disease and Improving Public Health” was aimed at re-orienting the nation’s health care system toward health promotion and disease prevention. As any health economist will tell you, the key to achieving a reduction in health care cost lies in keeping people out of the hospital: preventing chronic illness through lifestyle changes and managing chronic illness on an outpatient basis. Title IV focused on increasing access to preventive services, establishing a national prevention and health promotion strategy, and developing a national public-private partnership to conduct prevention and health promotion outreach and education campaigns.
The same section of the current law also authorized several important new programs, for the operation of school-based wellness clinics, for an oral health education campaign, and Medicare coverage for 100 percent of the cost of preventive services. In addition, it provided money for grants to communities for wellness initiatives, authorized the Centers for Disease Control to undertake pilot programs for 55-64-year-olds to evaluate chronic disease risk factors, and provided funding to study best prevention practices and evaluate the most effective employer wellness programs.
Title V, “The Health Care Workforce” established a National Health Care Workforce Commission to review current and projected workforce needs and to provide information to Congress and the administration to align federal policies with national needs. In addition, it set up loan programs in areas of critical shortages, supported workforce training programs in areas such as rural physicians, direct care workers in long term care facilities, geriatric practitioners, family caregivers, family medicine, pediatrics, dentistry, mental and behavioral health practitioners.
Title VI, “Transparency and Program Integrity” established rules to reduce fraud in public programs and protect patients by providing them with additional information. For example, nursing homes must make information about their ownership public, and information about staffing, certification, complaints and violations must be available on a Nursing Home Compare website.
In addition, nursing care facilities are required to train all staff members in dementia management and abuse training. Title VI set up a detailed and comprehensive set of program integrity provisions for the Medicare and Medicaid programs. It also included the “Elder Justice Act” which is aimed at preventing elder abuse, neglect and exploitation.
Title VII, “Improving Access to Innovative Medical Therapies” established a procedure under which the FDA will license a “reference product” and addresses the approval of biosimilar or interchangeable products. It also extends a program through which drug companies provide medications at a discount to some hospitals such as rural hospitals, children’s hospitals, and cancer centers.
Title VIII, “Community Living Assistance Services and Support” established a revenue-neutral program for people with functional limitations
Title IX, “Revenue Provisions” contained all of the tax provisions that fund the expansion of services. All would be repealed under the AHCA, which provides a tax break to families with incomes of over $250,000. Under the ACA, those families paid an additional 0.9 percent on income over $250,000, which the Republican bill would eliminate. The AHCA would also remove the assessment of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and eliminate the requirement that health insurance companies spend 85 percent of the premiums received on providing services to the people they insure.
Title X, “Strengthening Quality and Affordable Care” contains a variety of provisions aimed at improving the health care system. Examples are: creation of incentives for states to shift Medicaid beneficiaries out of nursing homes into home and community-based services; establishing a Pregnancy Assistance Fund for the purpose of awarding matching grants to states to assist pregnant and parenting teens and women; improving health care coverage for individuals exposed to environmental health hazards; grants to medical schools to recruit students from rural areas who want to practice in their home towns; grants to small businesses seeking to develop workplace wellness programs.
There are a lot of additional sections I haven’t mentioned. Republicans have often criticized the length of the ACA. Those roughly 900 pages included many important policies that are completely lost in the current debate. The ACA was a serious effort to address significant issues. Not just the fact that, at the time of its passage, 45 million Americans were uninsured, but also escalating health care costs and significant disparities in quality, depending on where care is delivered. (Low-income people and racial minorities get poorer care and have worse outcomes throughout the lifespan, and health care dollars are distributed unequally.) The ACA tackled all of that.
The American Health Care Act, in contrast, has a simpler focus: removing health care coverage from those who can’t pay for it themselves, and removing protection from those who have pre-existing conditions. Don’t believe it when they say that those people are protected. They’re not. I used to be a pediatric critical care nurse, and I cared for babies born with heart defects. They had a “pre-existing condition” for life, and, until the ACA, couldn’t get insurance unless they got a job with really good employer-based coverage. Sometimes not even then.
The AHCA will not provide coverage if you are poor, have spent all your assets getting care, have a chronic illness, are in an accident, or want to get regular check-ups or take medication. The bill is a tax break for the wealthy and the insurance industry, pretending to be a health care bill. It is shameful.
Ruth Thompson shares her remarks from the Our Lives on the Line health care rally in Des Moines on July 29. She has previously described how the Affordable Care Act saved her daughter from potentially severe medical complications and crushing debt. -promoted by desmoinesdem
I’m a person with lived experience with disability and I’m the vice-chair pro-tem of the Disability Caucus of the Iowa Democratic Party, I serve on the board of the Central Iowa Center for Independent Living and a very active member of the Polk County Democrats.
I’m speaking as a representative of those groups and as an individual who cares about health care.
According to 2014 data from the state of Iowa data center there are 353,435 people with disabilities in Iowa.
95.4 percent of them had health insurance and for a majority of them, that insurance is Medicaid.
Medicaid has long been the health care safety net for people with disabilities.
Medicaid matters to people with disabilities in ways that many of us can’t even imagine For many people with disabilities Medicaid provides more than access to the doctor. It provides durable medical equipment like wheelchairs. And non-durable supplies continence supplies. It covers emergency and non-emergency medical transportation. In some cases it provides nutritional assistance. It provides chore and homemaker services and personal attendant services to keep people living in their homes and communities.
Typically, if people don’t have home- and community-based Medicaid services they have to live in a nursing home.
But if Medicaid is capped and block-granted, it’s possible that there won’t even be nursing home funding. It frightens me to think about what current health care bills will do to people with disabilities. Medicaid Expansion, which was part of the Affordable Care Act has brought access to health care within the reach of a great number of Iowans, including a great number of Iowans with Disabilities.
So far I’ve given some facts about Medicaid but I want to tell you about someone that I love who doesn’t use Medicaid for his health care. But he’s benefitted enormously from the affordable care act.
Howard and Mary Ann Claytor are folks like us. They live in St. Albans, WV just outside of Charleston, which is the state capitol. Howard works in the chemical industry that lines that Kanawha River in West Virginia. Mary Ann, like I did, works for the State of West Virginia. They’re good, solid working people who want the best for their family.
I don’t know them from our jobs. I know them from our children. My daughter, Ashleigh and their son, Cedric grew up together. Cedric is a good-looking smart, funny, engaging and kind young man. He was an athlete, excelling in gymnastics and he was the first male cheerleader in the history of St. Albans High School. It seems like I’ve always known Cedric. I took a trip to South Africa when my daughter was in Jr. High school and although my daughter was not remotely interested in traveling to Africa, Cedric was. Our running joke was that the next time I went, I’d take him instead of Ashleigh. But it wasn’t really a joke. I absolutely would have taken him with or without my daughter had the opportunity presented itself.
As children do, ours grew up. After graduation, I moved my daughter and I to the Midwest. She went to WIU to become a teacher and and Cedric went to WVU to become an accountant. I began to hear that Cedric wasn’t doing well physically. He began to develop a series of blood clots that would temporarily incapacitate him. This continued to re-occur and he had to drop out of school. Eventually Cedric was diagnosed with an extremely rare liver disease, Budd-Chiari Syndrome that was causing these blood clots throughout his body, eventually destroying his liver and requiring a transplant. Fortunately, Cedric was covered under his father’s employee insurance, which is, relatively speaking, a really good health plan.
About 4 years after the transplant, Mary Ann noticed that Cedric had developed a slight limp. It was the beginning of another decent into illness when Cedric was diagnosed with a second rare condition, possibly inherited from the donated liver, Neuromyelitis optica which affects motor function. The Claytors have shifted their focus from recovery to palliative care as their son developed paralysis. He now has a teacheotomy to assist with breathing and receives nutrition through a feeding tube. He has to be shifted frequently to prevent pressure sores His movement is primarily limited to his eyes and mouth.
Howard continues to work to support their family, but Mary Ann left her job with the state to be Cedric’s full-time caregiver, essentially turning their home into an intensive care unit with breathing machines and monitors, a manual lift and feeding tubes to keep Cedric alive.
Even before his transplant, Cedric’s medical bills were at 600, 700, eventually, 800 thousand dollars. They began to get letters from their insurance company that said payments for his care would soon end because they were reaching the million dollar cap on even his father’s outstanding health policy. Just about a month before that would happen, the Affordable Care Act kicked in, eliminating the lifetime cap.
They didn’t buy their insurance through the ACA marketplace, nor do they qualify for Medicaid. But one part of the ACA removed a barrier that would otherwise have destroyed any chance they had to pay for the care that Cedric needs to stay alive and at home.
Howard shared that although they both earn good salaries, if it weren’t for the ACA, Cedric would have been dead a long time ago and they would be out on the street because of the cost of their son’s health care.
They were given a reprieve but only a temporary one. For the past 7 years, the GOP has been threatening and trying, unsuccessfully, to repeal the ACA. The Claytors find themselves living in fear and uncertainly. They’re unsure that the terms of their current insurance will be revoked in the rush to repeal and maybe or maybe not replace.
Mary Ann shared that they’re not rich, they’re middle class, but that keeps getting beat down. They worry about any executive order or new legislation. Waiting for the other shoe to drop and what that would mean for their son.
People who are insured by Medicaid and people for whom the ACA hasn’t worked out so well. Our health care matters – for many of us it’s life and death.
I’ve talked a lot about the current state. I’m going to take just a minute to talk about some next steps.
Just as a disclaimer, I am speaking now solely as a policy wonk and have researched health care delivery systems for years. I represent nobody but myself for this part of my speech.
Some of our great democratic Iowa lawmakers are proposing a Medicaid for All solution to carry us over. I’m excited about that. But even that is in question, depending upon what happens on a national level. And because Medicaid is a federal-state partnership in which States have a great deal of say in what it pays for and how it covers beneficiaries, it’s not portable or even alike from state to state. It’s a great band-aid but it’s not great for long term.
One of the first things I learned is that Medicare has only a 3 percent overhead while insurance companies have around 33-35 percent overhead. In Iowa, we have three MCOs, which are in essence insurance companies at play in our Medicaid system. It’s no wonder that the can’t seem to operate within the budgets they’ve been given by DHS – As players in the for-profit world, they’re not meant to.
Additionally, if you consider every dollar that employers and individuals spend on health care and add that to the cost of heath care to the government, we could, as a nation have a universal, national health system that costs much less than we are currently spending, leaves nobody out and would give us much better health outcomes than we have now.
I’m part of a group, Medicare for All, that is proposing just that: Slightly tweaking and improving Medicare to eliminate donut holes in coverage and eliminating the need to purchase most supplemental insurance coverage so that every American, regardless of where they live or travel in the US can have access to health care.
I urge lawmakers of both parties and on both a state and federal level to listen to the concerns of their constituents and to people who have expertise in health care delivery systems to consider Medicare for All as the best, possibly the only solution for health care in the US.
To all the Democrats who want to hear directly from each contender in the Iowa governor’s race before deciding how to vote next June: this post’s for you.
All seven Democrats running for governor appeared at the Progress Iowa Corn Feed in Des Moines on September 10, speaking in the following order: Cathy Glasson, Fred Hubbell, John Norris, Ross Wilburn, Jon Neiderbach, Andy McGuire, and Nate Boulton. I enclose below the audio clips, for those who like to hear a candidate’s speaking style. I’ve also transcribed every speech in full, for those who would rather read than listen.
As a bonus, you can find a sound file of Brent Roske’s speech to the Progress Iowa event at the end of this post. With his focus on single-payer health care and water quality, Roske should be running in the Democratic primary. Instead, he plans to qualify for the general election ballot as an independent candidate, a path that can only help Republicans by splitting the progressive vote.
CATHY GLASSON: IOWANS ARE “READY TO RISE UP FOR BOLD, PROGRESSIVE CHANGE”
Glasson got the crowd going as the last gubernatorial candidate to speak at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame event in July. She was first up on a hot and sunny afternoon at the Simon Estes Amphitheater in downtown Des Moines.
How are you doing, corn feed? I don’t hear you out there: how are you doing?
I want to thank [Progress Iowa leader] Matt [Sinovic] and all the sponsors of a great Corn Feed. And we have a beautiful day here in Iowa, but I want to take a minute, because on our beautiful day here, there [are] millions of Americans who are suffering today. And I want to start by acknowledging our brothers and sisters who are going through their own life and death situation in Florida, and the families starting to recover in Texas, and the Oregonians who have been struggling to contain wildfires in their state.
We’ve seen big parts of our country literally getting ripped apart by these storms and climate-related disasters. But our country, torn open by Mother Nature, we’ve seen America’s heart. The Florida man who gave up the last generator at a Home Depot store because he met a woman who needed it more than he did. Because her father needed oxygen and life-sustaining equipment. The Texans that we all saw, in their kayaks, their fishing boats, their rowboats, rescuing their neighbors, risking their own lives to make sure no one in their community was left behind.
You know, as an intensive care unit nurse, I’ve watched with pride my fellow nurses, doctors, hospital workers, and first responders who stand in the eye of the storm to give all of their neighbors a fighting chance. And we’ve also witnessed the decency and the humanity of our fellow Iowans right here, sending food and supplies to Houston for the dogs and the cats who are homeless and hurt. Sending water and essential supplies to families who have lost everything. Heading down to those states to volunteer at shelters. And medical personnel driving over 15,000 miles to answer the call for help.
Through all of this we are all reminded why government and public service matters. [applause] That fully funding our health and human services saves lives. Let’s face it, folks: you can’t privatize a disaster.
While we’re fighting back in Iowa against an attack on our public workers, we’re seeing in this crisis that those workers are true public servants. Public employees are the home-town heroes who really make America great. And if we want them to be there for us, we need to be there for them.
My name is Cathy Glasson, and I believe that the number one job of a governor is to raise wages and improve the standard of living for all Iowans. [applause] And let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen: this governor, Kim Reynolds, isn’t getting that job done very well.
We have 381,000 households in our state that struggle to pay their monthly bills. And two-thirds of the jobs in our state pay less than 20 dollars an hour. The unemployment rate may be low, but the misery index is high.
I’ve been traveling our state. Whether it’s from Dubuque to Moravia, from Milford, Iowa to Keokuk, Iowa. And what I’ve been listening to Iowans and hearing over and over, is that they feel forgotten and left out. Left behind by a rigged economy that hasn’t worked for them and their families for decades. Cheated by politicians who are bought and paid for by big corporations and CEOs. Hurt by a health care system that costs too much, cares too little, and puts profits at the top before patients every single time.
You know, the Iowans I’m listening to are sick and tired of getting beat up. And they’re ready to rise up for bold, progressive change in 2018. They don’t want half measures. They want big, bold, new ideas to move our state forward.
They’re ready to rise up for $15 minimum wage. They’re ready to rise up for expanded union rights. They’re ready to rise up for universal, single-payer health care. And they’re ready to rise up for clean water, safe communities, and a solid, quality public education for our teachers and our kids K through 12 and higher education.
Ladies and gentlemen, we can win in 2018 if we listen to Iowa and build a bold, progressive future together. My name is Cathy Glasson, that’s why I’m running for governor. Join the movement. Thank you. [applause]
FRED HUBBELL: “PUT THE MONEY BEHIND THE PEOPLE, NOT BEHIND THE FAILED TAX BREAKS”
Hubbell started his speech by joking that he thought the big “Corn Feed” banner was a typo for “corn fed”–a reference to his campaign’s green t-shirts featuring the slogan “Corn Fed, Iowa Bred, Voting For Fred.”
So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for being here today. It’s a nice beautiful day–it is a little warm, so thank you for taking your time to be with us. I too just want to remind everybody: right here [the Simon Estes Amphitheater] in 1993, this was underwater. Under a lot of water.
And in 2008, Cedar Rapids, the whole river, the whole downtown was underwater. And those folks in California and Texas and Florida, they helped us out. So we need to think about them, and we need to help them out. So I encourage you to contact Red Cross and other groups. [applause]
So I actually am a fifth-generation Iowan. My great, great grandfather came here at the age of 16, just a couple blocks down the street here was the train stop. He had to get off there because that was as far as the train could go.
Twelve years later, he and a bunch of local people started a business right here in Iowa. Equitable Life Insurance Company of Iowa. And the reason they did that was because, a lot of insurance companies from the east coast were doing business here, and people like us were paying premiums that they took out east. So Iowa money was being used to build the east coast. And they figured out that that doesn’t make any sense. You want to build your economy with your own local money.
So they started an insurance company right here, the first one west of the Mississippi. And all of the premiums were invested right here in Iowa. That’s the way you build a business. You invest in your home town, your home-town people, and your home-town businesses.
And you know what? Our governor up here and the legislature, 150 years later, are making the same mistake. By taking all of the money that we are paying as taxes and putting it out of state to out-of-state companies that don’t pay taxes, but they get a refundable tax credit, so we’re writing them checks.
$45 million a year, ladies and gentlemen, goes out of Iowa to write checks for out-of-state businesses, even though they pay no taxes. 150 years later, we’re making the same mistakes. That’s not good government.
This Iowa Fiscal Partnership report explains how the Research Activities Credit, originally designed “to support start-up companies,” now “primarily benefits very large companies,” which “pay little or no taxes.” Brianne Pfannenstiel covered the controversy surrounding that tax credit in this article for the Des Moines Register. Back to Hubbell’s speech at the Corn Feed:
You know what else? Back in the 1980s, I was one of the people running [the] Younkers department store business all across Iowa. Well, you might remember in the 80s, we had a big, serious farm crisis. A lot of farmers were in deep trouble. Many of them were going out of business. Many of them were going bankrupt.
What Younkers did, was we had stores all across the state. We had a lot of employees, and we had a lot of customers that were suffering from that. So we decided we needed to do something to help the community. Because that’s what good employers do, and that’s what good CEOs do, is they help the community. They invest in people.
So we started the Farm Aid, Farm Aid relief concerts with Willie Nelson. They were here for the next five or six years. Raising funds for the local farmers to be able to help keep them on their farms, so they didn’t have to go bankrupt. That’s what good businesses do, that’s what good leaders do.
I wasn’t aware of Younkers supporting the Farm Aid concerts. Mentioning that was a subtle way for Hubbell to one-up Norris, who often mentions on the stump that he helped organize a Farm Aid concert in Ames during the 1990s. (During the Hall of Fame event, Norris got in a dig at Hubbell, remarking that politicians who “tout the size of campaign war chests are out of touch with Iowans.”)
Back to Hubbell’s speech:
A few years later, I was running the Equitable Life Insurance Company, the one I mentioned a few minutes ago. I was approached by the woman who was running Planned Parenthood. You hear that, ladies? Planned Parenthood. [cheers]
The woman who was running that was having trouble getting into Dubuque. A lot of people were trying to get services from Planned Parenthood in Dubuque. They wouldn’t–nobody up there would rent them a building or sell them a building.
So they came to myself and my wife, and they said, is there something you can do to help? We can’t get up there, and a lot of people need our services. So we thought about it, we looked around, we tried to figure it out. We helped them open in Dubuque. We got them a building.
A couple months later, they were up in business, serving hundreds of people in Dubuque. Pretty soon it became thousands of people in Dubuque. That’s what stepping up to provide leadership is all about. That’s what leadership, what we need in Iowa.
But you know what? These same people who are sending the money out of state, they defunded Planned Parenthood, so now there’s clinics all across eastern Iowa that have been closed. That’s not what we want. That’s not the kind of leadership that we need.
So what do I want to do as governor? What I want to do is, first of all, put our budget behind the priorities. Because they talk about priorities over here, and they put the budget money over there. And that’s not how you make anything work.
Our priorities should be education, health care, and raising incomes for all Iowans, all across our state. And if we put the budget behind that, and we put the same kind of scrutiny on tax credits, tax deductions for business, that they are putting on human service programs, there’s a lot of money that we can free up to invest in education, health care, and raising incomes all across our state with a much smarter economic development program. [applause]
It’s not all that complicated. We just need a leader who knows how to do it. And a leader who’s not beholden to special interests, not worried about re-election. That’s willing to get in there, tackle the budget, put the money behind the people, not behind the failed tax breaks, and invest in our country, and invest in our state. Because our people are our best asset.
That’s why we need to invest in education, because that raises incomes for everybody. That’s why we need to invest in health care, because then people can be productive workers, and they can also be much more comfortable, much more confident at home with their families and their kids. Which makes a big difference in those kids going to school, and them going to work in the morning.
So if you’re interested in joining our campaign to make Iowa the kind of place it used to be, the kind of place it can be, please find a person over here in a green shirt. We’d love to have you sign up. We’ve got a lot of volunteers here, we’re anxious to get a lot more. Thank you very much, appreciate it. [applause]
JOHN NORRIS: “IT’S TIME WE EMBRACE OUR NEW IOWANS”
The Corn Feed took place a few days after President Donald Trump announced the federal government would soon end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has temporarily protected some 800,000 “DREAMers” (including about 2,800 Iowans) from deportation. Progress Iowa printed and distributed numerous signs that read “DEFEND DACA” on one side and “DEFEND DREAMERS” on the other. Sinovic encouraged the crowd to hold them up for a group shot before the candidate speeches.
Among the gubernatorial candidates, Norris devoted the most time to this issue.
Note: the apple Norris held during part of his speech alludes to the massive tax incentives package Iowa economic development officials recently approved for the Apple corporation to build a new data center in Waukee. All of the Democratic candidates for governor have criticized that deal.
Thank you very much, great to be with so many progressives. Matt, thanks for your leadership of Progress Iowa. And all of these great organizations up here, I hope you’ll take time to check in with their booths. I’ve worked with many of them over the years, and a special shout-out to the climate lobby, our Citizens Climate Lobby.
As we talk about the impact of global climate change, and its now-real impact on people’s lives, it’s time we do something about climate change and address that issue. [applause]
I’m familiar with all these organizations because I’ve been fighting with all of you for many years. When I worked for Tom Harkin, I was proud of his leadership on the Americans with Disabilities Act, and what that meant for empowering so many Americans, and justice for them.
When I marched with Cesar Chavez in California, to help bring environmental justice to migrant workers. When I marched with Paul Wellstone in Seattle at the “Battle in Seattle” against WTO [the World Trade Organization] and its harm to American workers and small businesses.
When I worked with Tom Vilsack and the Vision Iowa [program], to bring hope to rural communities. When I worked in the energy sector, at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with my directive from President Obama to increase renewable energy across this country.
Mine has been a life of progressive values and fights all my life. And like every one of you, I am worried about the direction of this state today, and so many people being left behind by a careless, insensitive governor and legislature that has literally abandoned our children, assaulted workers, neglected our environment, and been disrespectful to women, and we must change that in our state government. [applause]
It’s about priorities. They made it pretty clear what their priorities are, as you recognize this prop [the apple] I have up here today.
You know, we went from a nearly billion-dollar surplus in this state, to now a 350 million-dollar deficit. We have robbed our children in education. We’ve robbed our most vulnerable by this privatization of Medicaid, and now the 90-day rollback, and the pressure that puts on our most vulnerable citizens and our hospitals, and particularly rural hospitals.
The “90-day rollback” refers to the Reynolds administration asking the federal government for permission to revoke retroactive eligibility for new Medicaid recipients, who currently can be covered for medical care received during the three months before they join the program. Republicans in the Iowa House and Senate included that policy change in the health and human services budget for the current fiscal year. Back to the Norris speech:
Our government workers are stripped away of [their] collective bargaining rights, and now overtime pay. Not dealing with our clean water problem in this state–our dirty water problem in this state–and conservation that is bedrock to our future and our value of love for the land.
They’ve done all of that at the expense for handouts for special interests and the power of wealthy corporate lobbyists. And we saw an example recently in Iowa.
I think it’s great that Apple is here. But it’s not great that we’re giving them taxpayer money, for one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, while we’re not funding education, we’re not cleaning up our water, we’re not addressing the health care needs of Iowans. [applause]
So now we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em. Right where we want ’em. They don’t have any more millions of dollars to hand out to their wealthy special interests. They don’t know how to govern now. They didn’t in the first place. They can’t do the only thing they know, which is hand out special favors to their wealthy friends.
And Iowans want a change. They want a government that looks out for workers. Looks out for children, [and] our most vulnerable people, and paints a brighter future for everyone in our state.
Let me close with this. When I announced my candidacy for governor, I started in Storm Lake, Iowa. Because I wanted to talk about what it means to have a governor with vision. And yes, I chose a Republican governor. Governor [Bob] Ray. Who understood Iowans were a welcoming state, and we embrace people who need help and lift them up, as he did with the southeast Asian refugees after the Vietnam War.
He understood Iowans. Those folks in charge now do not. I just traveled to northwest Iowa the last two days, and every community is looking for workers. There’s a worker shortage. But we’re trying to drive out, we’re trying to drive out of this state our new Iowans, who are a part of our future?
It’s time we embrace our new Iowans, and paint a future that’s bright for them but also needed for our entire state. [applause]
I hope you’ll do all you can to be visible and raise your voices against DACA [repeal], and be visible and raise your voices to Iowans about the need to support our new Iowans. They are a part of our future. Our governor should lead that.
When I’m governor, I can tell you I will be down there at that vigil, that we had in Des Moines [on the day DACA repeal was announced], and our governor was absent. To look out for our new Iowans and the people who need us to step up.
Step up for our future, step up for the welcoming Iowa values that we have. That’s what we need in a leader in this state. Because Iowans are leaders.
And in the backdrop of Charlottesville, let’s have Iowa be the state that leads this country to standing up for those people who need us to stand up for them. That’s what being a leader is all about. I know Iowans want that in ourselves. Help me do that.
John Norris for governor, thank you very much. Now if you’ll excuse me, I can catch the second half of my son’s football game. Thank you very much.
ROSS WILBURN: “LET’S GET BACK TO BEING IOWA … WE CAN DO BETTER”
Wilburn is probably the last candidate to enter the Democratic race for governor, and Progress Iowa’s event was the former Iowa City mayor’s first chance to address a large activist audience in Des Moines.
Hello Iowa, hello. All right, good to see you, my name is Ross Wilburn, and I’ve been living in Ames for the past three years. Thirty years in Iowa City before that, and I went to junior high and high school in Davenport. And I feel fortunate to have lived and grown up in Iowa, and to serve the people of Iowa, doing so now at Iowa State University Extension and Outreach in community economic development, and I’m their diversity officer.
I was also pleased to have served Iowa City as mayor and a twelve-year [city] council member. My third month as mayor was when the tornado hit. And we dealt with tornadoes and floods, and so you don’t have to–while our hearts are in Texas and Florida and out West, you don’t have to look too far beyond Iowa to find the dramatic effects of climate change.
So I’m looking forward to working with you, all of us, together–to try and take action that we all want to see in Iowa. We want to see a strong, sustainable economy. We want to see clean water. We want to pay attention to our natural resources. We want good health care, we want a strong education system.
And my message, our message to Iowa, is “Let’s be Iowa.” Let’s be Iowa. No matter how you feel about fireworks, whether they should be shot off here in Iowa or not, fireworks didn’t create a sustainable job. It didn’t get anybody’s health care back. It didn’t address the mental health system. It didn’t clean up our water.
And so, we need to recapture the Senate and the House, and get a Democrat in Terrace Hill [the governor’s mansion]. We can do that. We can do that. [applause]
As we’ve all been traveling around Iowa, Iowans want a healthy Iowa. They want a prosperous Iowa. They want a welcoming, inclusive Iowa.
A healthy Iowa: Iowans have said it’s a right. Health care is a right, and we need that single-payer plan. We can do that. We can do that if we make a difference here in Des Moines, on the ballot in December, as well as on the ballot starting next week with school boards, and November with city councils. Don’t forget those: they are very important.
And it’s not just our physical health, it’s our mental health. Closing down mental health centers without a plan for families and individuals to get support at the community level is not Iowa. That’s not who we are. We are better than that. [applause]
And it can’t just be about our physical and mental health. It’s got to be about our environmental health. What good does it do if we can’t drink the water and breathe clean air? We can do this. We can do this together.
A more prosperous Iowa: how about starting with that $15 livable wage? Not for extravagant things, but to help Iowans pay for everyday living things, have that money circulating about the local economies.
How about let’s invest in corporations and businesses that invest in Iowa, in Iowans. They don’t fight efforts to collectively bargain–which we need to restore those rights. They don’t make–they don’t ask for something in return, without giving back to us. Let’s make those investments in corporations that short-term, that give back to us.
And an inclusive, welcoming Iowa: Governor Ray in the 70s and Iowa did welcome folks from southeast Asia, and that was an Iowa thing to do. But it’s not just DACA, it’s folks from around the world who are contributing to our local economies, who are contributing to the state of Iowa. We need to get back to being a welcoming Iowa.
So those messages that we’ve been seeing around the country, those voices and faces of hate: imagine having to go and apply for a job with someone, imagine going to apply for a loan with someone that you saw with those messages of hate. Seeing someone at work.
My message to Iowa is let’s get back to being Iowa. We are a welcoming state. We can push through those messages of hate, but it’s going to take all of us speaking out. We’ve got to show love and we’ve got to choose a better message than hate. We can do that. I need you to help us help Iowans choose a better message than hate.
You see, it’s not just about diversity and inclusion. They are important, but it’s not just about that. It’s about a welcoming, friendly, encouraging Iowa.
We want to have an Iowa where there’s economic opportunity for all, so that we are getting back to those Iowa values. Can we do better? Can we do better than that, Iowa? [applause]
We can do better. Let’s be Iowa. Let’s be Iowa. Come on. Thank you, appreciate your help.
Good afternoon. Great crowd here today, delicious food, great groups back against the railing, lots of information being shared, and obviously soon the opportunity to hear some folks who well may be the next president of the United States [referring to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon]. A pretty exciting day.
I’m Jon Neiderbach, and I’m running for governor. Many of you may have voted for me in 2014, and don’t recall it. I was the nominee for state auditor down-ticket, not something that people really focus on.
I frankly had planned to not do politics again after that election. A lot of interesting experience running in a statewide race, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to bite it off again. And then frankly, all the awful things of this past [legislative] session started happening, and it was clear that our state finances were going downhill real fast. And I got the strong impression that I needed to jump in to raise a bunch of issues that were not going to be raised otherwise.
There’s an awful lot of agreement among the strong field we have on a lot of issues. There are some differences here and there–whether or not you should raise [wages to] $15 an hour immediately, something I think we should do, or wait a while. Whether or not you should have Medicare for All at the state level, single payer, and do it over a consortium of states, not wait for the feds, like I think we should do, or whether we should wait for the federal government.
There’s a lot of–how we should finance and improve our water. Whether or not we should devote the statewide sales tax, or make the polluters pay, like I think we should do. [applause] Basic economics: if you spread the cost of a problem among everybody, there’s very little incentive to change behavior.
But frankly, that’s not why I’m running. Those are important things, but you never can tell how that’s all going to roll out.
What really makes me angry is we need as a party to recognize, voters are fed up, and they know that the system is rigged against them.
I traveled the state for [my] state auditor campaign in 2014. When you’re running for state auditor, what can you ask people? There aren’t a lot of issues. You ask folks, how do you think government is working? And boy, do you get an earful. You ask people how should government be done better, and you get more of an earful. And also, since I’ve announced [for governor] in March, I’ve also gotten an earful from people.
It is clear people are fed up, and they understand what an awful lot of politicians don’t: that the political system is rigged, that the economic system is rigged, and frankly, something very dear to my heart as a lawyer, that the legal system is rigged.
I’ll toss out one example as far as the legal system–political and economic, I think you’ve already heard some great examples. But the legal system is rigged: if you write a bad check three times, you’ll probably wind up in prison. First you’ll get probation, then you’ll get jail, then you’ll wind up in prison. If you get three credit cards and don’t pay them and declare bankruptcy, you’re not going to go to prison. Heck, if you do it enough times, you can become president. [laughter]
That illustrates how wrong our system is. And it pervades the entire system. There was just a study done by the ACLU, that African-Americans in Iowa are 8.34 percent–8.34 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana. Now I don’t think there’s a big difference in the rate of use of marijuana among African-Americans and non-.
Our whole legal system, our whole economic system, our political system, from top to bottom, is rigged. Upper-income people pay less of their income in taxes than lower-income people. It shouldn’t be right–it shouldn’t work that way.
I will be somebody–my whole life, I have never been afraid to challenge the status quo, from working for Gene McCarthy when I was 12, to fighting against the sales tax that was proposed for Polk County a few years ago, that would have hurt low-income people in order to give rich folks a property tax decrease.
I have never been afraid to challenge the status quo. I have never been afraid to go against the powerful and the people with money. I will not be afraid to do that as your governor.
I also have extensive experience. I know how Iowa government works. Fifteen years working as staff for the legislative branch, fifteen years working in the executive branch, a member of a school board for four [years], a year as president of the Des Moines school board. I know all the thigs that are broken in Iowa government, and I won’t be afraid to tap the best and the brightest to challenge the status quo to get them fixed.
Jon Neiderbach, I ask for your consideration. You know, the election isn’t this November. Everybody is so fired up because of Trump, you’d think the election was this November. The election isn’t until June, for the primary. Kick the tires, talk to the candidates. I ask for your consideration, and hopefully I’ll earn your support. Thank you very much. [applause]
ANDY MCGUIRE: “I CARE ABOUT EVERY IOWAN BEING A SUCCESS”
Dr. Andy McGuire devoted more of her remarks to health care than did any other candidate. The same has been true at every venue where I’ve heard multiple gubernatorial candidates this year, including the Hall of Fame event.
Hello, Democrats! Are you ready? You fired up? I’m Andy McGuire, seeing some friends, and new friends, old friends, and friends I haven’t even met yet. But I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself.
I’m from Waterloo. I was raised in a family of eight. I had a dad who came home from World War II and started a construction machinery business. My mom stayed home and took care of us. And you know, I’ve talked to a lot of you. What I was taught when I was growing up was about caring for others. That’s what they instilled in me, and they instilled that when a neighbor was sick, we went and helped them out. And when somebody in the community needed help, we all came together and got them back on their feet, like we’re seeing in Texas and Florida.
Do you know, I’ve been all over Iowa in the last two years [McGuire chaired the Iowa Democratic Party in 2015 and 2016], and you know what I’ve seen and heard?
I’ve heard that people aren’t getting a fair shake. And they’re not getting ahead for their families. And they feel like the Branstad/Reynolds administration is putting profits ahead of people. Is that how you feel? [applause]
Well, I want to change that. I’m a doctor. I’ve been a doctor and caring for people my whole life. And I care about every Iowan being a success. Every Iowan. That’s what we ought to have in our governor.
I’ve also heard about health care. And as a doctor, I want to say one thing: health care is a right, not a privilege, correct? [applause]
I’ve been listening to people about this Medicare [Medicaid] mess, that’s the nicest word I can use for it.
And you know, we put 600,000 of our fellow citizens in danger of not having access to health care. Think about that. Is that the Iowa we want to be?
I talked to a mom, she has a child with disabilities. She has to drive an hour and a half to get her child health care. We don’t need to do that, folks, and as governor, I will make sure no mother and no person worries about access to health care in Iowa. I will make sure of it. [applause]
I’ve talked to people who are, their families are struggling with mental health issues and substance abuse and addiction. I bet you all know somebody who’s struggling. And yet, we’re 50th in mental health beds. 47th in mental health providers.
And we’ve, we’ve really turned our police into our first-line mental health workers. They put people in jails and in emergency rooms, two of the most expensive and worst places for someone in crisis. Well, I’d like to take that money and put it into counseling so that we can help people before they get to crisis. So as your governor, I will make sure there are mental health resources in every community for our struggling citizens. [applause]
I’ve talked to some of the 15,000 women who no longer have their Planned Parenthood clinics. I’ve talked to them about their worries about where they’re going to get their health care, where they’re going to get their cancer screenings, where they’re going to get their family planning.
I see a lot of you with these buttons on [expressing support for Planned Parenthood], and I’m so glad you’re here. You know what? First day in office, as a woman, as a doctor, as a mother of five daughters, I will restore Planned Parenthood funding that very first day. [applause]
That promise has been a staple of McGuire’s stump speech for months, and it puzzled me. This year, Republicans created a fully state-funded family planning program, excluding all organizations that provide abortion services. After the Poweshiek Democrats picnic in Grinnell on August 27, I asked McGuire how she could in effect overturn a state law.
“Some lawyers have told me that that’s possible,” she said. How? Through an executive order that establishes a new family planning program? McGuire indicated that the governor could use discretionary funds to go “around the law, if you will.”
I certainly wouldn’t need to decorate my office. So yes, I think there are discretionary funds that you could do the first day to get that going. Because we need to. I mean, you know every day, somebody’s not getting birth control. And that means somebody’s life could be really altered.
So this is something that can’t wait. We cannot–I will do all the things to get it changed the other way. But that first day–this is, this is an emergency to me. Because I mean, I know there’s young ladies out there who, their life is going to be changed because of this. And we can’t do that. Plus, cancer screenings, and 15,000 of our Iowans? We have got to do this.
Picking up with McGuire’s speech at the Corn Feed:
I’ve talked to a lot of people about education, a lot of parents. You know, they worry about their kids. Some of the kids don’t even have enough books so that they can have their homework, can take their homework home at night.
That’s not the Iowa we want. We used to be a beacon for education, and we should be that again. Are there any teachers in the audience? Can you wave at me? Let’s give our teachers a hand, shall we? [applause]
You now, our teachers deserve our respect, and they deserve the resources they need to make sure that our kids can get the great education they need. And I will make sure as governor that every child in every zip code has quality public education. It will be one of my goals. [applause]
I talked to some people, actually we were talking back there about–some people are having two and three jobs and are just not getting ahead, because they’re working for minimum wage. You know our minimum wage is seven and a quarter an hour? And has been since 2008, almost a decade?
I think hard-working Iowans need a raise, what about you? So I support $15 an hour minimum wage. [applause]
I also talked to people about this attack–and that’s what it was, folks–an attack on working men and women when we stripped collective bargaining rights. We have got to put those back, because that not only hurts public-sector unions, that hurts all of us, folks. It’s going to impact Iowa, and we have got to put those collective bargaining rights back for our hard-working union members. [applause]
I have seven kids and one grandchild, hopefully more. And they’re all moving back to Iowa. And that’s one of the reasons I want to do this. That’s one of the reasons, because I want them to be a success. I want my kids and my grandkids to be a success. I want your kids and your grandkids to be a success.
I see an Iowa where they grow up and they don’t have to worry about access to health care. Where they don’t have to worry about having a great public education. Where they don’t have to worry about having a good-paying job with good benefits anywhere in Iowa.
That’s the Iowa I see for our future. That’s why I’d like you to support me, because that’s the governor I want to be. It’s McGuire for governor. Thank you so much for your time. [applause]
NATE BOULTON: “THIS IS A FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF OUR STATE”
Boulton had the loudest cheering section at the Corn Feed and gave the longest speech among the gubernatorial contenders. Not surprisingly, the candidate with some two dozen labor endorsements so far spent the most time talking about workers’ rights.
Thanks for that warm welcome, I appreciate that. It is great to be with Progress Iowa today. I’m proud to support this organization and all it does to help our progressive message catch on across the state.
So, my name is Nate Boulton. I’m a state senator who represents east Des Moines and Pleasant Hill. But I grew up in Columbus Junction, a small town of about 2,000 people, in the middle of a small county of about 10,000 people. My mom and step-dad still live on a heritage farm just outside of Columbus Junction. It’s been in my step-father’s family for over 150 years.
My father came out of Bandag tire plant and Muscatine, now is involved in the Steelworkers Union statewide. His father, my grandfather spent 20 years, two decades as the chief union steward at Rath Packing house in Columbus Junction for the UFCW. I’m very proud of my family’s history.
And I’m proud to have continued that work, of standing up. Standing up for workplace rights and safety, advocating for people who put in a full day’s work to try to get ahead.
I’m proud to have done that as an attorney for the last twelve years. Representing injured workers in workers’ compensation, trying to put their lives back on track after sometimes disabling and debilitating work injuries. Representing people wrongly terminated due to no fault of their own. Representing labor unions as they negotiate fair contracts for the work that they do, making sure that they are organizing new workplaces. Representing victims of sexual harassment in the workplace.
I do those things because it is part of my family’s tradition. And that’s what I wanted to do when I got to the Iowa Senate. To stand up for workplace rights, to stand up for working families, and advance a quality of life for workers across this state.
Yet we saw a different agenda taking hold when I got there. You see, we had Governor Branstad, Lieutenant Governor Reynolds, a Republican House and a Republican Senate, and they reminded us that they had full control of state government every single day.
And what did they do with that opportunity? Nothing to do with their promise of 200,000 new jobs and increasing Iowa’s earnings for families by 25 percent. They forgot that legislation.
Instead, they introduced an agenda that only held back and took away from people who need an advocate now more than ever. People who go to work every day. What did their agenda do?
They blew holes in the state budget. Continuing their corporate tax credit system. Credits, exemptions, and giveaways for some of the world’s wealthiest corporations. Blowing a hole in our state budget, now almost $600 million dollars a year being handed out, and balancing that budget on the backs of working families.
We saw this agenda and what it did. They defunded Planned Parenthood, shutting down four Iowa health care facilities for reproductive health care services for Iowa women.
They’ve underfunded education now seven years in a row. In a state that has always prioritized education, underfunding it against the rate of inflation for seven consecutive years.
They pushed through a bill on workers’ compensation, actually further harming those who are injured on the job, trying to advance Iowa’s economy with their work and their labor.
And they attacked public employees, those who answer the sacred call of public service. Our teachers, our firefighters, our police officers, our social workers, our road workers, the very people that keep our communities safe and secure, were told they’re entitled to fewer and lesser rights in their workplace.
This was a very hurtful agenda. This is the same group of people that pushed through a privatized Medicaid system that does not work for patients. That we’re hearing from providers of care that it is hurting their ability to provide health care services, which by the way, doesn’t just affect Medicaid recipients, it affects all of us. And now even the managed-care organizations are telling us, we can’t continue in this system unless you bail us out, because you gave us bad information when we made our bids in the first place.
Iowa is better than this. Iowans are better than this. We have stood up for a different vision for our state.
The tough fights define us, and we were in those fights together. I was proud to lead Senate Democrats–I know we have a couple here, I know Senator [Joe] Bolkcom’s here, I think I saw Senator [Rob] Hogg–as we fought that public sector bargaining bill. All through the night, 26 consecutive hours, amendment after amendment. I was proud to stand there every step of the way with our public employees. [applause]
And I was proud to stand with you as you came to the Iowa Capitol by the thousand. You showed up at forum after forum by the hundred to stand up to this agenda.
The tough fights do define us. But we have to start offering our vision forward if we are going to win in 2018.
This is a fight for the soul of our state. We are going to determine the long-term future of Iowa in this election. And by the way, the fight for 2018 starts now. It starts with people like Phil Miller, stepping up and winning a special election in Fairfield. [applause] I was proud to be knocking doors with him twice, and I am looking forward to having him serve in the Iowa legislature.
It starts with an election on Tuesday, as we elect school board members. [applause] It starts with an election in November this year, as we elect local officials in city government, people that should be standing up for the public employees that have been under attack this past year.
We are building a movement here. But we have to do more than talk about the things we are against as we build that movement. We have to offer that positive vision forward for Iowa’s long-term success.
Think about what Iowa can achieve, think about the opportunity Iowa has ahead of us if we start planning for the next 20 years, not just the next 20 months.
Think about what Iowa could look like if we get back to fully funding education as a priority, back to recruiting quality teachers into our classroom. [applause] Not raising tuition by 7 percent per year at our public universities. Not by underfunding our community colleges, not by taking away opportunities.
We need the best and brightest coming into our classrooms to teach the next generation of our state’s leaders. It’s going to be hard to do that when we tell them that they are worth less in their workplace. When we tell them they have to invest more of their salaries, that they have just been promised will never keep up with inflation for the rest of their career, because the state underfunds their classrooms.
We should have a state where we once again ensure that every Iowa child, no matter where they grew up or who their parents are, is entitled to reach their full potential with an Iowa education. That’s an Iowa value that we must stand together for in this election. [applause]
Sharing that vision forward as we address the very real problem of climate change, that we have seen another reminder again this week of how harsh that reality is. And Iowa is positioned to lead. It’s economic opportunity for our state, investing in wind and solar technologies. We get a third of our energy from renewable resources in this state. We can get to 50 percent renewable energy produced in this state by 2025 and produce more quality Iowa jobs as we do it. [applause]
Think about what Iowa looks like if we invest in that long-term future, investing in education, investing in quality job growth. Because Iowa’s strength isn’t the coupons of the Branstad/Reynolds administration. Iowa’s economic strength is the most educated, skilled, productive workforce in the world, that we can ensure is ready to meet the challenges of a changing economy with a quality education, with investments in community infrastructure in our mid-sized and rural and urban communities, that are ready to see economic progress that’s sustainable in our state again.
We do these things because these are the important things to our families, to our neighbors, and to our future generations.
That’s what this election is about. We will determine Iowa’s long-term future in this election. And believe me: Kim Reynolds is nervous about it. We heard from her–when she gave her first set of remarks after being sworn in as governor, what did she say? “We need to do something about tax policy, we need to do something about education,” as if those two problems just fell from the sky after Terry Branstad was sworn in to go to China.
No, no, no, this is her agenda. And we’ve seen what her agenda has meant to 2,800 Iowa public employees who were just told they’re not going to get overtime pay for overtime work. That was her administration’s decision, not anybody else’s.
So let’s remind Iowans what’s at stake in this election. Let’s stand up. Let’s build the movement we need to win this fight for the soul of this state. My name’s Nate Boulton, I’m running for governor, and I ask for your support in that effort. [applause]
Film-maker Brent Roske made a pitch for his independent campaign after Norris and before Wilburn. I didn’t transcribe the speech, but here’s the audio.
Near the beginning, Roske said he’s “not against the Democrat Party, not against the Republican Party, or against the Libertarian Party. But I’m running as another avenue to get progressive and Democrat and independent ideas into the statehouse.” He proceeded to explain why he believes the time has come for single-payer health care, and how important it is to clean up Iowa’s waterways.
Let’s get real. Roske’s ego trip won’t bring any progressive ideas into the statehouse. All he can accomplish is diverting some general-election votes away from the only candidate with a chance of beating the Republican nominee.
If the Democratic race turns negative, or the nomination is decided at a state convention (because no candidate won 35 percent of the vote in the primary), there may be some hard feelings among activists whose favorites fell short. Roske made clear he’ll be happy to pick up the pieces: “Since I’m running as an independent, I’ll be on the ballot in November. And if your candidate up here by chance doesn’t make it there, I hope you think about voting for an independent.”
Advocates for strong environmental policies and Medicare for All can’t move the needle toward those goals by voting for Roske in 2018. They can only make him a spoiler.
Top image: Independent candidate Brent Roske and Democrats Cathy Glasson, Fred Hubbell, Nate Boulton, Andy McGuire, Ross Wilburn, and Jon Neiderbach. Not pictured: John Norris, who had to leave the event earlier for a family obligation.
U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst joined all but one of their Republican colleagues to approve a $1.5 trillion tax cut and health care policy overhaul late last night. Whereas Ernst had told Iowans, “I look forward to carefully reviewing tax reform legislation in the Senate,” the final vote “came after Senate Republicans frantically rewrote the multi-trillion dollar legislation behind closed doors to win over several final holdouts,” Politico reported.
The Washington Post’s James Hohmann wrote a comprehensive piece on “six violations of traditional governing norms that we’ve witnessed during the tax debate.” Dylan Scott noted that the process was not the “regular order” Senator John McCain had previously demanded: “the bill that passed out of committee isn’t the one that the Senate will pass — and the changes that are being added didn’t come through the usual amendment process, but by backroom negotiations with defecting senators.” One late amendment will benefit a single private college in Michigan; influential alumni include the billionaire Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. UPDATE: In a vote after 1:00 am, four Republicans joined all 48 Democrats to reject that amendment. However, Grassley and Ernst voted to keep the perk.
Norman Ornstein, who has studied Congress for decades and works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, tweeted on Friday, “There has never been a more outrageous, revolting, unfair process to pass a corrupted bill in the history of Congress.”
Repealing the individual mandate to purchase health insurance will destabilize insurance markets and make policies unaffordable for many who don’t receive coverage through their jobs.
I enclose below press releases from Iowa’s senators hailing a disgraceful vote. Neither of them acknowledge that “The big business cut would be permanent, while the rate reductions for real people are set to expire after 2025.”
UPDATE: The Washington Post’s Heather Long wrote the best, concise rundown of major provisions in this bill. Tara Golshan explained here how the bill “could trigger a $25 billion cut to Medicare.” Senator Susan Collins of Maine claimed yesterday to have secured a promise from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that Medicare won’t be cut. But if you read his letter carefully, he didn’t make an ironclad pledge.
I forgot to link to Grassley’s November 30 interview with National Public Radio on why he was supporting the tax bill.
SIEGEL: Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, who co-chaired the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, write this about the tax bill today. They say (reading) it reads as if it were developed for a country whose debt problems have been solved when in reality debt is the highest it’s been other than around World War II.
I want to hear from you. What happened to your concerns about deficits and the size of the debt, which would go up by $1.5 trillion, it’s said, under this bill?
GRASSLEY: It’s because of the concern of the debt that we’re very much writing this bill and because over the last eight years, the economy has only grown on an average of 1.4 percent. The 50-year average is about 3 to 3.5 percent. So we have a situation in our country where the economy isn’t growing, and the whole idea behind this is that we get the economy growing at 3 percent so we can start to pay down on the national debt like we did between 1997 and the year 2000.
SIEGEL: But you agree that before you begin to do that, this bill would increase deficits and the debt by at least $1.5 trillion, some would say, unless you really do take away middle-income tax cuts, $2 trillion, right? Are those numbers about right?
GRASSLEY: Yeah, if you look at it on paper the way the Congressional Budget Office puts things together, that is right. But here’s what it leaves out is if we can get just four-tenths of 1 percent growth in the economy, then that is made up. […]
SIEGEL: I want to ask you about estate taxes. The Tax Policy Center estimates that nationwide only about 80 family-owned small business and small farm estates will face any estate tax in 2017. Why is it so important to raise the ceiling on estate taxes when already a couple can pass on an estate of up to $11 million tax free?
GRASSLEY: I suppose to show appreciation for people that have lived frugally early in their life, delayed spending so they could save. It seems to me there ought to be some incentive and reward for those who work and save and invest in America as opposed to those who just live from day to day. You could take the same hundred-thousand-dollar income for two people – one of them, they spend it, have it all spent at the end of the year and the others have saved a fourth of it and invested and create jobs and leave something for the future. The first person leaves nothing for the future.
SIEGEL: But very, very few couples that make a combined income of $100,000 are going to have estates of $20 million that they pass on. I mean, that’s a tiny fraction of people.
GRASSLEY: Listen, in no way is my statement meant to dispute the statistics you gave me. I’m giving you a philosophical reason for recognizing savings versus those who want to live high on the hog and not save anything or invest in the commodities.
December 2 statement from Senator Chuck Grassley:
Grassley: Tax Reform a Victory for Iowans of Every Level of Income and Way of Life
WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a senior member and former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, voted for landmark tax reform legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which passed the United States Senate today.
“The passage of this bill is a historic moment for Iowa and the entire country. It’s been more than 30 years since Congress passed significant tax reform. The good news is that this legislation will let Iowans keep more of their own hard-earned money, increase average wages and help create new jobs.
“This reform bill enacts across-the-board tax cuts, providing financial relief to middle-class and low-income earners who need it most. As just one example, an average family of four with two children would receive a $2,200 tax cut. Lowering taxes lets people decide how to spend more of their own money instead of Washington politicians. It would help working families struggling to make ends meet, allow farmers and small business owners to further expand and invest, and makes American jobs and workers more competitive globally.
“This bill also gets rid of the unfair and regressive Obamacare individual mandate tax, giving Iowans the freedom to make choices that work best for them instead of being forced by the federal government to purchase an unaffordable product they either don’t want or don’t need. More than 52,000 Iowans in 2015 were required to pay the individual mandate tax, even though more than 80 percent of those who paid the tax made less than $50,000 a year. That’s a tax on working families, and I’m hopeful to see it gone.
“The Senate passage of this legislation is a victory for Iowans of every income level and way of life, but there’s more work to be done. It now needs to be reconciled with the House-passed version. This is a once-in-a -generation opportunity to make lasting reforms to our broken and outdated tax code. I look forward to working with my House and Senate colleagues to draft a bicameral bill to be signed into law by the President.”
Grassley successfully included several provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, including whistleblower protections, taxpayer rights and corporate accountability measures. More information on these provisions is available here. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Grassley previously led through Congress $2 trillion in bipartisan tax relief, leaving more money in workers’ pockets, reducing tax rates across the board and spurring economic growth and activity. Congress later made permanent the vast majority of the Grassley-led measures with significant bipartisan support.
December 2 statement from Senator Joni Ernst:
Ernst Votes to Reform Tax Code, Promote Economic Growth
Includes Iowa Senator’s SQUEAL Act
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) issued the following statement after the Senate passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which includes the SQUEAL Act:
“Today, the Senate took a monumental step forward in pursuing a simpler tax code that provides much-needed relief for hardworking Iowans and helps strengthen our economy. It also eliminates ObamaCare’s costly individual mandate that forces Americans to buy health insurance that is in many cases for Iowans, unaffordable.
“Additionally, I am thrilled that the SQUEAL Act is included in this tax reform legislation. My proposal will force Congress to offer up its own unnecessary tax break that allows Members of Congress to deduct, for income tax purposes, thousands of dollars annually in living expenses while in the Washington, D.C. area.
“This Senate bill also includes a bipartisan measure I helped lead to spur economic growth in poverty-stricken areas, and bring hope and opportunity back to many distressed rural communities in Iowa.
“Moreover, job creators of all sizes will finally see relief from the burdensome and complicated tax code. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would allow Iowa small businesses and entrepreneurs to keep more of their hard-earned dollars to reinvest in their companies, and is estimated to create over 10,000 jobs across Iowa. This legislation also gives more money back to Iowa’s hardworking parents by doubling the child tax credit.
“While the bill does not include everything I hoped, I am pleased that this legislation creates more opportunities for all, including lower- and middle-income families across the State of Iowa who will see thousands of dollars back in their pockets. I look forward to seeing this important bill move ahead to reduce the burden of our overly-complicated tax code and enact reforms that provide relief to Iowa’s hard-working families and businesses.”
Senator Ernst’s efforts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act:
SQUEAL Act
The Investing in Opportunity Act
Read Senator Ernst’s recent column in the Des Moines Register on the importance of tax reform here.
LATER UPDATE: The Des Moines Register’s Jason Noble checked the numbers on the estate tax. Contrary to what Republican politicians like Grassley and Representatives David Young and Steve King would have you believe, Noble confirmed few Iowans are subject to the tax. An even smaller number of Iowans who would pay estate tax own farm assets.
The estate tax applies to around 5,000 taxpayers across the entire country each year, and very few of them come from Iowa. Of the Iowans subject to the tax, only a fraction are actually farmers, and a vanishingly small number of them face a tax bill requiring them to sell off farmland or other assets. […]
According to IRS data from 2016, just 682 tax filers in the entire country who owed estate taxes owned any farm assets. That represents about 13 percent of the 5,219 estate tax returns in which taxes were owed. […]
Kristine Tidgren, the assistant director of the Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation at Iowa State University, said she’s not aware of any Iowa estates forced to sell land since the estate tax exemption was raised to its current level in 2012. […]
The number of small businesses impacted by the estate tax is similarly small. […]
All this means, in essence, is that lawmakers’ argument for abolishing a tax that generates tens of billions of dollars annually is based on the challenges faced by perhaps a few dozen farm estates and a few dozen more small businesses across the entire country. […]
In a Nov. 29 interview, Grassley was adamant about the need for change, even if farmers and small business owners represent a tiny minority of estate tax payers. The reason, he said, is as much philosophical as practical.
An estate tax effectively and unfairly taxes a person’s earnings twice, he argued: first when they earn it and again when they die. And, he added, it penalizes savers without touching spenders.
“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Voters in Iowa’s first district favor an unnamed Democrat over two-term Representative Rod Blum by 51 percent to 43 percent, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling. Respondents in the same survey opposed the tax bill U.S. House Republicans approved last month by a 50 percent to 44 percent margin.
Not One Penny didn’t release full results or cross-tabs from Public Policy Polling’s survey of 677 voters in Blum’s district on November 27 and 28 (margin of error plus or minus 3.8 percent). The polling memo provided the following highlights:
50 percent of IA-1 voters are opposed to the tax plan recently passed by the House (including 39 percent who strongly oppose the plan) while just 44 percent are supportive (only 22 percent strongly support). Moreover, among the 49 percent of voters who have heard, seen, or read “a lot” about the plan, opposition to the tax proposal rises to 59 percent compared to just 40 percent who are supportive. The more voters are paying attention to the tax plan, the more they hate it.
In addition, individual provisions of the tax plan are just as, if not more, opposed by voters in IA-1, including:
• Reducing the tax rate on corporations from 35 percent to 20 percent (41 percent support – 51 percent oppose);
• Eliminating the estate tax on estates valued at $5.5 million for individuals and $11 million for married couples (34 percent support – 54 percent oppose);
• Eliminating the ability to deduct for state and local taxes paid from federal income tax (22 percent support – 62 percent oppose); and,
• Paying for the tax plan by increasing the national debt by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years (21 percent support – 67 percent oppose).
Furthermore, most IA-1 voters believe the wealthiest Americans would be the top beneficiaries of this tax plan – 61 percent think the wealthiest households would benefit more, while just 33 percent think the middle class will benefit more. Additionally, 60 percent would be less likely to support the tax plan when informed that passage would trigger a $25 billion cut to Medicare.
Finally, looking ahead to next year’s midterm elections, a generic Democratic opponent already leads Congressman Blum in a hypothetical 2018 election matchup by 8 percentage points (51 percent to 43 percent), but his vote for the tax bill further hinders his likelihood to win re-election: 54 percent say they are less likely to vote for him because he supported this legislation.
The memo didn’t include any findings on Blum’s favorability or job approval. PPP measured the incumbent’s approval at just 33 percent last month.
Public Policy Polling didn’t test Blum against an unnamed Democrat in its last two IA-01 surveys, so it’s hard to say whether an 8-point lead for a generic opponent represents slippage for the incumbent. A PPP poll taken the first week of November, commissioned by Democratic candidate Thomas Heckroth, found Blum trailing Heckroth as well as Democratic candidate Abby Finkenauer by 1 point, within the margin of error. In early October, PPP surveyed IA-01 for the Patriot Majority Fund and found Finkenauer led Blum by 42 percent to 40 percent, also within the margin of error.
The new Not One Penny commercial hammers on some of the unpopular features of the House Republican tax bill, saying the plan gives millionaires like Blum a big tax break while raising taxes on 36 million middle-class families. It also cites the AARP as saying that ending the medical expense deduction “means a tax increase for many older Americans.” Here’s the video:
The spot Not One Penny aired in IA-01 in late August and early September made a more general case against Republicans approving tax cuts that would benefit their wealthy donors:
The tax bill will also be a key theme of anti-Blum messaging from the End Citizens United political action committee. That group spent $117,377 against Blum during the 2016 election cycle and put him on its top target list for 2018. The PAC’s new page on Blum explains why he’s among the “incumbents who represent the worst of Washington’s rigged system”:
When it comes to choosing between the greed of his mega-donors or the needs of his constituents, Congressman Rod Blum has chosen his mega-donors time and again.
• Blum willingly sold out his constituents to please his donors and gave tax breaks to the mega rich. For example, Blum repeatedly did the bidding of some of his biggest campaign contributors. During the health care fight this spring, mega-donors — who stood to gain millions in tax breaks from an ACA repeal — threatened to withhold contributions from GOP Congress members if they didn’t vote ‘yes.’ While the secret money group American Action Network — which had previously spent nearly $700,000 supporting Blum’s campaign — ran an ad campaign pressuring the Congressman, Blum flipped his vote from a hard ‘no’ on repeal to a ‘yes.’ In doing so, Blum put more than 40,000 people in his district at risk of losing health insurance.
• Blum sided with the Koch Brothers and Club for Growth against the Export-Import Bank, despite the $42 million it supported in exports in Blum’s district. Both the Kochs’ and Club for Growth became major supporters of Blum.
• Blum voted for the tax bill, the top priority for Republican mega-donors. It would raise taxes on 13 million Americans who earn less than $100,000 a year, while half of the benefits would go to the top one percent in the country.
• Blum voted for a bill backed by the mega-donor Koch brothers that seeks to keep Iowa voters in the dark about funding sources for secret money organizations. He also voted to block a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
In early November, End Citizens United endorsed Finkenauer, one of four Democrats running against Blum. The others are Heckroth, Courtney Rowe, and George Ramsey III.
Any comments about the IA-01 race are welcome in this thread. The latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office indicate that the district’s 20 counties contain 159,352 active registered Democrats, 142,538 Republicans, and 191,620 no-party voters.
Top image: Screen shot from a new tv ad Not One Penny is running in Iowa’s first Congressional district.
Jeff Cox sees one gubernatorial contender best positioned to help Democrats become the majority party again. Bleeding Heartland welcomes guest posts advocating for candidates in competitive Democratic primaries. Please read these guidelines before writing. -promoted by desmoinesdem
There is only one word to use when surveying the damage the Republicans are doing to Iowa and America: depressing. We need to keep our eye on the ball, though, and avoid being diverted into competitive name-calling with Republicans. We need to elect Democrats until we regain a majority at every level of government. In the present crisis, any Democratic victory is a win, no matter how awful the Democrat.
In addition to issuing an “all hands on deck” call to elect Democrats, we should also have a discussion about how we got into this mess of being a minority party at every level of government. We could do worse than look back to a period of history when Democrats were the natural party of government, the half century beginning in 1932.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected by promising a New Deal for the American people, he brought to an end a half-century of Republican majority rule. Republican political dominance had been based not merely on money or organization or their dominance in the media. It was based on their ideas, which corresponded with what most people regarded as “common sense”: balanced budgets for families and governments alike; what’s good for General Motors is good for the country; if you work hard and avoid spending your money on booze, women and movies you won’t be poor and you might get rich; the appropriate response to poverty is charity; government can do nothing much about a depression except wait for a natural recovery.
Roosevelt challenged “common sense” with a series of legislative initiatives that violated that common sense in almost every way. He created federal entitlements available to all Americans regardless of income, e.g. Social Security. (An entitlement is a program that is not means-tested, i.e. you don’t have to prove you are needy to draw the benefit.) He also put government resources directly into the hands of working people, and the power of the federal government squarely behind working people with the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act.
Republicans were furious, and remained furious for fifty years, because Roosevelt and the Democrats had transgressed the boundaries of the old common sense and Democrats were winning elections anyway. When the electoral pendulum swung back to the Republicans in the 1950s, they scaled back on the New Deal achievements but failed to repeal a single one of them. The New Deal became the new common sense. Government was the solution, not the problem, and tax money should be used to benefit working people, not big corporations.
In the 1950s and 1960s conservatives were forging an intellectual counter-attack on New Deal socialism, reading thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and the novelist Ayn Rand, a favorite of both Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan. When the Democratic Party fell apart in the 1970s over issues of war, race, and runaway inflation, Republican conservatives seized the opportunity in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Republicans won elections for another 40 years by turning the old Democratic Party common sense on its head. The depression of the 1970s/80s they claimed was caused by government and the welfare state. The solution was to starve the beast by shrinking government. They went to war with the New Deal, and they are still at it.
Just as Republicans had been traumatized by the ascendancy of New Deal ideas, Democrats were traumatized by the Republican revival. Convinced that there was something wrong with the New Deal, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama embraced the ideas known as neo-liberalism, i.e. pro-corporate and pro-free trade policies based on the view that the corporate economy can be micro-managed from above by technocrats, and that government entitlements should be replaced by means-tested programs targeted to those who truly need them
Neither Clinton nor Obama was capable of establishing a new neo-liberal common sense. When Clinton came into office, Democrats appeared set to regain majority status. When he left office, the Republicans once again controlled every level of government. History repeated itself with Obama who came into office with Democratic majorities in the midst of a depression. His policies were a kind of neo-liberal Anti-New Deal: bailing out big banks with direct government subsidies; a home foreclosure program that bailed out mortgage lenders; pay freezes and layoffs for public employees; a minimum wage capped at $7.25; trade deals that further depressed wages and undermined unions.
Finally, Obama crafted a health insurance program that, unlike the New-Deal based Medicare, was based on the principle of means-testing rather than entitlement, dividing Americans against each other based on income levels rather than bringing them together under a universal program. By the 2016 elections, Democrats were left defending a robust recovery characterized by low wages, long hours, bad working conditions, extreme job insecurity, widespread health care insecurity, and lack of economic opportunity for young people burdened with student debt. Bruce Braley’s attempt to hold on to Tom Harkin’s Senate seat by defending Obamacare put Joni Ernst in office The attempt to create a new neo-liberal Democratic common sense failed at the polls.
The surprise of the 2016 Presidential election was the unanticipated resurrection of the New Deal. FDR rose from the grave in the unlikely person of Bernie Sanders running as a Democrat. He launched a campaign based on a New Deal approach to the Depression of 2008: a one trillion dollar green jobs program; free tuition at all public colleges and universities, a universal entitlement to health insurance (Medicare for all); a $15 an hour national minimum wage with no exceptions. He addressed the widespread anxiety about campaign finance reform by refusing corporate campaign contributions (while accepting help from unions) and limiting individual contributions to $2700.
Sanders went on to attract more caucus attenders in Iowa than any other candidate, and carried primaries or caucuses in 22 states (including every congressional district in Minnesota, rural and urban, and every county in West Virginia), garnering 45% of the elected delegates. Clinton narrowly won the nomination fair and square in my opinion, in part because Sanders was challenging the entrenched “common sense” of the Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan Republicans, and the neo-liberal consensus among leaders of the Democratic Party, who had succeeded in lowering the expectations of Democratic voters about what is possible. Despite that, Bernie Sanders remains far and away the most popular political leader in America, and has changed the debate inside the Democratic Party in fundamental ways back to the New Deal.
This brings us to the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary. The consensus among most of the candidates appears to be: turn the clock back by undoing the damage the Republicans have done, restore collective bargaining rights, restore minimum wage increases, fund public education fully at all levels, put more money into health care, especially mental health funding, de-privatize Medicaid, and fund Planned Parenthood.
This is an admirable agenda, but it is also a “business as usual” agenda in which Democrats propose to return to the status quo before the Republican take-over in Iowa, to the very status quo that produced Republican landslides. But how does this agenda address the crisis of campaign finance, the staggering load of student debt faced by Iowa students, and the lack of educational and job retraining opportunity for working class, small town, and rural Iowans?
There is only one candidate who stands out from the business-as-usual crowd in this race, and that is Cathy Glasson. Glasson is the only candidate willing to be an advocate a modest but absolutely essential reform: eliminating tuition at our community colleges. This will provide educational opportunity and a ladder to a higher degree for high school graduates, not to mention urgently needed job re-training opportunities for workers made ‘redundant’ in our brutal, NAFTA ridden capitalist economy. She also proposes freezing tuition at our three Regents universities, the only practical way to deal with the student debt crisis.
Campaign finance? Like Sanders, Glasson refuses to accept corporate PAC contributions. She is funding her campaign mostly from small contributions by members of her union. The business-as-usual candidates appear to be thumbing their noses at an Iowa public convinced that the campaign finance system is corrupt by bragging about their superior ability to raise money, or funding their campaigns with contributions from the oligarchs of the Des Moines business elite.
Finally Glasson, a nurse, is the only candidate who understands that, while Medicaid can and must be improved, it can’t be fixed. A means-tested program, it can’t cover everyone who needs medical care and it can’t provide health care security, which is what Iowans need. Even a de-privatized Medicaid will have a big target on its back that says “welfare,” and will be chronically underfunded, leaving poor Iowans in perpetual uncertainty about their access to health care. The only way to fix Medicaid in Iowa is to fold it into a national Medicare for All program, which is on the way to becoming the new “common sense.” Democrats should get on board.
Republicans have made themselves unpopular in many ways, and Democrats will probably win back lost ground in 2018. Having won, though, can we keep an electoral majority? For that we will have win the war of ideas, and go back to the future, to the principles of the New Deal that have a proven record of working.
Jeff Cox
This is a revised version of an article that first appeared in The Prairie Progressive, which appears quarterly in hard copy, printed in a union shop, delivered by unionized postal workers. For a year’s subscription, send $12 to The Prairie Progressive, Box 1945, Iowa City, IA 52245.
LGBTQ issues are increasingly prominent in Western countries during the past decades. In the United States, orientation has been on the forefront of the national consciousness for a considerable time. Since the nationwide marriage equality climax of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, however, a different letter of the acronym has assumed the focus – the T for transgender – supplanting orientation with gender identity in social consciousness for the first time in modern history.
Trans individuals, a smaller but notable subsection of the LGBTQ community, are nothing to sneeze at. We are 0.6 percent of the US adult population. That might seem small, but that’s nearly two million in 2018 estimates. In perspective, that’s about the population of the Las Vegas metropolitan statistical area, the amount of Muslims in the United States, or the total national population of either Latvia, Gabon, Slovenia, or Macedonia.
Iowa, one of the few Midwest states with LGBTQ non-discrimination protections, is on the low end. Of the Iowa population, 0.31 percent or 7,500 people are estimated to be transgender; essentially the population of Knoxville, Clear Lake, Charles City, or Perry. Imagine one of those towns’ whole populations having to scavenge for a handful of health care providers statewide and you’ll begin to understand the difficulty of securing trans health care in the Midwest.
TRANS HEALTH CARE ARCHIPELAGOS
Seen as a fringe group, there is a severe lack of education regarding trans subjects globally. Socially, we are a frequently-targeted group for negative treatment. Factors combined, health care providers often refuse to treat us. Trans health care providers often mitigate this by establishing themselves in larger, more liberal cities, both to secure patient access and personal security. Altogether, trans health care providers become and are scarce and highly localized. Trans health care is thus a system of highly localized areas of care within a larger whole devoid thereof; these are akin to islands in an ocean, islands of care.
For Iowa specifically, the Gay Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) only lists ten LGBTQ accepting/trained primary care physicians in their provider directory, of which only four explicitly offer services such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The directory is not a comprehensive list, however if one assumes many times the GLMA number, one still results with a considerable, overwhelming number of trans patients per provider.
Our state’s primary islands of care are Des Moines and Iowa City. Iowa City hosts the University of Iowa LGBTQ Clinic, widely regarded as the highest quality in the state, which offers a large range of trans health care in a highly-trained, accepting environment under the direction of Dr. Nicole Nisly and Dr. Katie Imborek. The best known Des Moines providers are Dr. David Yurdin of Primary Healthcare, Inc. and Dr. Joseph Freund of UCS Healthcare/Franklin Family Practice. To be clear, a handful of providers are holding up the majority of Iowa’s trans population. This system might appear unstable at first glance, and that’s because it is.
UNSTABLE ISLANDS OF TRANS HEALTH CARE
Naturally, the reliance of a relatively large amount of trans individuals on a sparse collection of providers makes the system inherently unstable. A recent example from northeast Indiana is a case example. Trans patients scrambled after one of two providers in the area disappeared overnight and left many without basic health care. After having the proverbial rug pulled out from underneath them, most of those patients struggled to find care. Sadly, this is in line with a 2017 national survey of trans individuals which showed that around a third of those trans persons surveyed had received refusal of care, harassment, and discrimination from health care providers.
The disruption of any established trans health care provider will always negatively impact their patients. Whether gradual or abrupt, brief or permanent, the lack of health care prolongs, allows, and encourages suffering. The Iowa system is just as easily disrupted as the Indiana system. If, say, the University of Iowa LGBTQ Clinic disappeared, suffering and death would be a likely result. Like a three-legged chair, the elimination of any of the pillars supporting the meager system will inevitably result in the system, and those supported by it, crashing to the ground.
Rural populations have always had difficulties accessing goods and services of those within the more connected urban areas. The islands of care system fails them the most. Imagine living in the vast ocean without ready access to providers, as shown in the lead graphic above. That is the reality of care for rural trans people in Iowa and elsewhere. Trans individuals in those locations face the prospect of traveling large distance (a considerable cost of time and money) to access care. This is yet another burden on the harsh life trans individuals deal with in the country, which is typically more conservative and discriminatory.
BARRIERS TO CARE
There are multiple barriers present, all with their own issues, which impede trans health care and those who need it:
Barrier of Legality
Trans health care must be legal. Currently in the United States, trans health care exists in a grey area. It is neither explicitly approved or disapproved. What is permissible varies highly on state and the state-federal delineation. The current, building vein of judicial understanding is that gender identity is a subset of sex discrimination, and thus protected. This can be seen in the Affordable Care Act as well as a recent ruling of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In Iowa, trans health care is legal, as are legal gender marker changes.
Barrier of Provider
Trans health care providers must be present. While training programs are increasing, they are still woefully small, and most medical professionals, especially doctors, are not trained in the care of trans individuals. Older schools of medical thought are often opposed to the continued existence of trans people. Trans man Jay Kallio harshly discovered this when his doctor, upon discovering his trans status, delayed cancer treatment and instead discussed psychiatry. Also, even if a trained provider exists, many don’t wish to have to continually fight the regulation of conservative states to exist and serve their patients.
In Iowa, as previously mentioned, there are some providers, but are located within their islands. Rural Iowans are greatly disadvantaged.
Barrier of Economics
Trans health care must be affordable. In the modern day, health care costs big money, most citizens don’t possess such money, and thus most individuals rely on health insurance for care. While primary care visits might be covered by one’s insurance, trans health care such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and gender confirmation surgery (GCS) vary widely in coverage, despite the current majority consensus view that trans health care is medically necessary among US professional medical associations.
Insurance coverage of trans health care is recent and varies greatly on the source of insurance. Large central Iowa businesses, such as Wells Fargo and Principal Financial, have trans-accepting employee insurance coverage. However, most trans employees aren’t so fortunate. Public insurance, such as Medicaid and Medicare, often require court cases to provide for trans individuals.
In Iowa, public coverage of trans health care is partial, however non-discrimination ordinances regarding housing and employment provide more economic stability for trans individuals.
Barrier of Practice
Trans health care must be well-practiced. Older schools of thought among medical and mental health professionals regarded trans existence as an unacceptable disorder which needed correction. Currently, however, the professions have evolved and moved on, regarding the relics of the past for what they are currently regarded – conversion therapy. Even today, medicalists abound arguing the fallacious position that one must be diagnosed transgender to really be such. There exists a cohort of both professionals and trans individuals who subscribe to the archaic, and absurdly wrong, Harry Benjamin-esque notions of “true transsexualism” being a special, elite class of trans.
Aside from that, general trans treatment standards require lengthy mental health evaluations, “real life experience” periods, and other restrictions most modern trans people regard as restrictive “gatekeeping” behavior that is tantamount to requiring medical approval to be transgender.
In Iowa, most providers ascribe to the “gatekeeping” standards, with only the University of Iowa LGBTQ Clinic showing decent treatment of non-binary trans individuals.
ISLAND POLITICS
The transgender existence is a political one. Like chattel, our humanity is argued everywhere from nightly news to social media. For many older adults LGBTQ prejudice is more virtue than sin. These social conservatives view inhumane treatment of trans people as warranted, moral, and desire it to be public policy. This can be demonstrated via the anti-LGBTQ “bathroom bills” and “religious freedom” legislation being advocated or implemented in conservative-controlled states.
Here in Iowa, a failed attempt at a bathroom bill (HF 2164) and two moving forward religious freedom bills (SF 2344, SF 2338) have been seen so far in the 2018 Iowa legislative session. Overall, these conservatives believe the right of trans people to decent treatment is less than the rights of them and others to discriminate against us.
Transgender rights and polices are debated at every level of government. From the Obama Administration’s pro-LGBTQ advocacy to the Trump Administration’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, trans existence is a hot topic. However, nationwide most states lack basic LGBTQ non-discrimination laws for employment and housing, let alone health care. Our dehumanization is a party plank for Republicans. They don’t want us in bathrooms, schools, military, hospitals, and clinics. This is because they don’t want us in society period, as seen recently in Kansas.
Naturally, this opposition makes it difficult to fix the unstable trans health care system. Social conservatives don’t wish it fixed, but rather dismantled. Regardless, the trans health care system is broken due to ignorance, prejudice, misinformation, law, policy, and money which have never let it become whole in the first place. It shall remain broken until those roadblocks are removed, however that doesn’t mean it is irremediable.
COMMUNITY VOLCANISM
Islands are generally created by fire and worn away by water. Similarly, the erosion of our islands of care can be undone by our passionate advocacy and action for trans health care. This can take many forms. In Indiana, a friend of one of the aforementioned trans patients stepped in and filled the gap in the region, opening a clinic after her medical residency. A new generation of health care providers are being educated and like never before regarding LGBTQ health care. In Iowa, advocacy groups such as One Iowa are leading the fight for better LGBTQ policy and legislation at both the state and local levels of government. The strength of LGBTQ people has always been in themselves and their community.
Everywhere, LGBTQ people, and the T especially, rely on each other to watch their backs, stand up for justice and humane treatment, and fight for a better future for the young LGBTQ people who have and are yet to come into this world. Yes, the system is unstable, but it’s always been that way, and it will continue to be that way until we make it better. So while the waves might batter our islands asunder, one active volcanic period creates new land that the waves will need to batter for decades, for centuries, and for millennia to wear away. Hopefully, that is what will come to pass.
Top image of Iowa’s trans health care islands designed by the author, used with permission.
A newly-formed political non-profit sent two mass mailings to Iowa Democrats this week in support of Eddie Mauro, one of three candidates seeking the nomination in the third Congressional district. The website and Facebook page for Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow do not indicate who is funding the effort, nor has the group filed 24-hour independent expenditure reports with the Federal Election Commission. UPDATE: The group belatedly submitted reports; added details below.
Few Iowans had heard of this organization before receiving the following mail pieces, which reached many Democratic households on May 30 and 31.
Like many election-related materials funded by outside groups, the pieces echo talking points the candidate has used in stump speeches and advertising. The “paid for” statement indicates Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow financed the mail.
U.S. law requires people or political groups to report independent expenditures related to a federal race to the Federal Election Commission. Any group that spends at least $1,000 within 20 days of the election (in this case, the June 5 primary) must “ensure that the Commission receives the report or signed statement by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard/Daylight Time on the day following the date on which a communication is publicly distributed or otherwise publicly disseminated.”
A search of recent independent expenditure reports on the FEC’s website shows no report on spending supporting Mauro and nothing related to Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow.
Speaking with Bleeding Heartland by phone this morning, Myles Martin of the FEC press office said his search turned up no raw, unprocessed filings by Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow and no faxed independent expenditure reports from the group. He also confirmed that within the 20-day window, groups must report spending for or against a candidate the day after the information was publicly disseminated. In other words, Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow cannot legally put off reporting this direct mail expenditure by delaying payment to the vendor until after the primary. UPDATE: Three FEC reports signed on May 31 now detail independent expenditures totaling more than $49,000. Scroll to the end of this post for details.
These pro-Mauro pieces must have cost substantially more than $1,000 to produce and send. Filings by Women Vote!, which is affiliated with EMILY’s List, indicate that mailings in support of IA-03 Democratic candidate Cindy Axne have cost more than $10,000 apiece.
I have been unable to reach Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow for comment on who is funding the mail campaign and how much the group has spent so far. The website does not include e-mail or phone contact information. No one has responded to a message sent through the organization’s Facebook page.
According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s records, Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow was created on May 8 as a non-profit corporation under Iowa Code Chapter 504. Des Moines attorney Gary Dickey is listed as the registered agent. When I asked him about the funding sources and whether the group plans to disclose its donors before or after the primary, Dickey replied by e-mail, “I was retained to organize the nonprofit corporation. I am not a member, officer, or employee of IFPT or otherwise involved in the fundraising.” He further noted that he was “not involved in the design or messaging” of the mailers.
This group exemplifies the lack of transparency in our current campaign finance system. Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow appears to have been formed solely to promote one candidate for one office. Yet its website and Facebook page don’t mention Mauro or reveal who is leading this “nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing progressive policy through public education using new as well as traditional media.” The only content visible to the public are generic statements about policy issues or progressive values.
A reader sent photographs of the third direct mail piece from this group.
LATER UPDATE: Rocky Sposato got in touch by e-mail to let me know,
We are an in state organization who supports the development of progressive polices that improve the lives of Iowans. We have made expenditures in the 3rd Congressional Primary in the same way other social welfare groups have supported candidates in the same race. In the future we will continue to support candidates that align with progressive policies and our vision for a better Iowa.
He answered a few follow-up questions. Will the group ever disclose the names of its donors? “We are going to follow all the current laws around having a 501(C)(4) and independent expenditures.”
If Mauro is not the Democratic nominee in IA-03, will the group support any other candidates this fall? “Yes, our primary purpose is to advocate for progressive policy.”
A reader noticed that Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow is registered at the same Des Moines address as the firm GOTV, LLC, which provided $7,500 in “consulting services” for Eddie Mauro’s 2016 Iowa House campaign. Was Sposato involved with that work?
Yes, I have been fortunate enough to work on many local campaigns over the last five years. I really enjoy organizing, knocking doors and other GOTV efforts. Unfortunately, my personal and professional life does not afford me the time that I would like to commit to those efforts. Thus was born, Iowans For A Progressive Tomorrow.
Why was the group late to file your 24-hour independent expenditure reports with the FEC? “It was a complete oversight on my part. As communicated above this is a very busy time for me. As soon as I realized the oversight I rectified the situation and set up procedures so that this would not happen moving forward.”
I sought further comment: is this organization a 501(c)(4) under federal law? The document on the Secretary of State’s website says it is an Iowa 504 non-profit. Sposato clarified, “We are organized in Iowa as a non-profit under 504 and treated as a social welfare group under 501(C)(4) for IRS purposes.”
Top image: Screen shot from the Iowans for a Progressive Tomorrow website.
First-person accounts of political events are always fun to read. Thanks to Susie Olesen, a semi-retired former teacher and school administrator in southwest Iowa, for this write-up. -promoted by desmoinesdem
Senator Joni Ernst’s July 6 town hall at the high school auditorium in Shenandoah (Page County) was a well-attended, civil meeting. People who wanted to participate filled out a slip of paper, which were drawn out of a glass jar to determine who would be able to ask questions. Ernst sat at a table in front of the room.
A farmer asked the senator about the tariffs on soybeans and other crops. The farmer said he can’t pay the bills if he can’t get fair prices for his commodities, and he expects good trade policy. He was polite but very frustrated over President Donald Trump’s abandonment of longstanding trade agreements.
Ernst responded that she has discussed trade policy with the president and his trade experts, and they have responded that they are working on deals. She mentioned numerous times she had a call scheduled right after the meeting with Robert Lighthizer who is President Trump’s trade representative. She said she goes to the White House regularly to discuss the current trade policy and has told the president he needs to get the deals done. She suggested if Canada didn’t cooperate in the NAFTA negotiations, the administration should go ahead and make a bilateral agreement with Mexico, suggesting that would force Canada to come around.
When asked specifically about dropping out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Ernst responded that Hillary Clinton didn’t support that agreement either, and had she been elected president, we’d be in the same position we are in currently. Ernst also said trade impacts defense, and the president should consider that. She talked at length about the tariffs and how dissatisfied she is, but she didn’t have any solutions. She kept reiterating that the president should “finish the deals.” She also noted that she had met with a roundtable of farmers earlier in the week, and there is real concern among farmers.
Ernst spoke extensively of China and their dirty dealings. She said they routinely break the rules and are untrustworthy and unreliable, and the U.S. has to make sure they stick by the deals we make with them. [Editor’s note: Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has pushed similar talking points lately.]
Audience members asked Ernst about Medicare, Social Security, and VA Benefits. A Vietnam-era vet said he experienced a bad year financially a few years back and received free health care through the VA, but when his income went up, the benefits weren’t as generous. The veteran said in exchange for military service, vets should all receive VA benefits. She disagreed and suggested the program would not be sustainable if all vets received full health care. As a result, they prioritize who receives full benefits through needs testing and combat experience. She said those with purple hearts and other awards for valor received priority.
Another citizen said she has twice paid thousands of dollars for hearing aids and they increase her quality of life. She thought hearing aids, eye exams and glasses, and dental care should be available through Medicare. While Ernst didn’t disagree with the specific comments, she said something will have to be done so none of these important programs run out of money and cannot be sustained. She said running them is expensive and mentioned possible needs testing, delayed retirements, and convincing young people they’re important.
One question was related to a crisis with a pension plan called the Central States. This will run out of funds by 2025, but is insured through the federal government. The pensioners’ benefits will be cut in half if nothing is done and the plan transitions to the federal insurance. Ernst said Congress has requested an audit of the organization to determine what exactly has happened but offered no timeline for that audit. She also made no promises about fixing the pension plan and restoring the original benefit expectations.
She was also asked about a veterans’ program in Shenandoah that has been expecting some sort of federal funding for some time but has not yet received it. I wasn’t clear about what it is and couldn’t find it online. She said the new VA Director would have to be confirmed first, and she wasn’t sure when that would happen. She said she would “look into it.” She did note that is one of many across the United States and there were many needs and not many resources.
She said the Congress is aware changes will have to be made to all of these programs if they are to sustain (Medicare, Social Security, VA benefits, pension plans, etc.), but she said she is one of the few people in Congress willing to discuss them and consider changes. She said keeping them as they are would be an expensive ordeal, and getting people to accept changes would be difficult. She said the government doesn’t have the money to cover everything.
I thought it a rather disingenuous comment given the Congress cut taxes by over $1 trillion in December of 2017, and those cuts primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans, certainly not those dependent on these programs for a reasonable quality of life. In case you’ve forgotten, Ernst voted for the cut.
Ernst was also asked about immigrants who had enlisted in the armed services with the promise that their service would result in citizenship. The previous day, the Associated Press reported that those immigrants were being discharged and the promise of citizenship being revoked. She said she had no prior knowledge of that policy as a member of the Armed Services Committee and would be looking into it. She said the government should follow through with the promise.
Someone asked if Ernst would support the McConnell Rule of not providing a hearing for a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court, since it’s less than a year prior to the next election. She quickly corrected the questioner and announced that the rule was not the “McConnell Rule,” but the “Biden Rule,” and it only applied to Presidential elections. She repeated the words “Biden Rule” about four times. Seemed fairly clear what the Republican strategy is regarding this issue, which is to deflect blame and accept no responsibility.
Explanation from Wikipedia and me: When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley refused to give a hearing to President Barack Obama’s appointee Merrick Garland after conservative justice Antonin Scalia died,
Republicans cited a 1992 speech by then-senator Joe Biden, arguing that if a Supreme Court seat became vacant during the summer, President [George H.W.] Bush should wait until after the election to appoint a replacement, or else appoint a moderate acceptable to the then-Democratic Senate. Little-noticed at the time, Republicans began to refer to this idea as the “Biden rule”. Biden responded that his position was, and remained, that the President and Congress should “work together to overcome partisan differences” regarding judicial nominations.
I believe rules are discussed and established through some formal process – this thing Ernst is calling the “Biden Rule” was just a speech by Joe Biden, and the vacancy never materialized. On the other hand, McConnell did obstruct the nomination process, but he and Grassley and the rest of the Republicans aren’t taking any responsibility for that – just not telling the truth and saying it is the “Biden Rule.”
A woman told Ernst she was horrified by the disrespectful language coming out of the Trump administration and wondered why the Republicans didn’t call him on it. She highlighted Trump’s criticism on Thursday in Montana of the elder President Bush’s volunteer program, 1000 Points of Light.
Ernst replied that bad language is a bipartisan issue and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders shouldn’t have been kicked out of the Virginia restaurant and that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt should have been able to eat his lunch in peace, rather than be interrupted by the teacher and her child asking him to resign. She told the story of a young Democratic intern yelling “F___ You” at the president. Ernst was indignant that the intern had been given a two-week leave rather than fired. She exclaimed that she would certainly have fired the intern. She was riled up about all the bad language of Democrats.
The senator did say she didn’t like it when Trump was critical and demeaned people about whom he was speaking. She was asked by a constituent in the audience if she would support a censure of the president for his language, since she was bothered by it. She said she would “look into it,” and she noted, honestly I might add, that even if she did offer a censure resolution, it would have to be approved by the Republican leadership and that wouldn’t happen.
The glass jar with the questions was large, and Ernst answered only a few. She repeated herself frequently and went off on long, boring tangents. I believe that was a tactic to avoid answering a lot of questions. [Editor’s note: repetition and filibustering to burn time are consistent features of Ernst’s public appearances.]
While I disagree with her politics, I commend her for having town halls. Representative David Young (IA-03) doesn’t bother with them anymore. He won’t meet with groups – only meets with individuals for about ten minutes at a time. Everyone at this meeting was very polite, so I’m not sure what Young is so afraid of. While there were a few groans, that’s to be expected. Democracy is enhanced when both sides share their views and try to listen to each other. I can say the crowd listened today, and I hope Ernst did as well.
Thanks to Jackie Steiber Cordon, Jan McCoppin Norris, Barb Nelson, and Pat Shipley. None of us took notes, but our lunch conversation and their comments on my Facebook page helped me put this together.
UPDATE: Someone who attended the town hall posted this YouTube video showing the Q & A about censuring the president:
Susie Olesen is a former teacher and school administrator who lives in Greenfield and is committed to making the world better for our children and grandchildren. She works part-time for Des Moines-based Iowa School Finance Information Services.
Top image: Senator Joni Ernst at a town hall in Shenandoah, July 6, 2018. Photo by Pat Shipley, used with permission.
“We need to use every tool we have to reclaim our country,” U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley told me during his latest visit to Des Moines. “We are at the verge of a tipping point, and maybe we’re almost past it, in which the power of the mega-wealthy is so profound that we can’t tip the balance back in to we the people.”
The senator from Oregon spent much of Labor Day weekend in central Iowa supporting Democratic candidates for the state legislature. His fifth trip here since the 2016 election won’t be his last: he will be a featured speaker at the Polk County Steak Fry later this month. During our September 2 interview, I asked Merkley about the most important matters pending in the U.S. Senate, prospects for Democrats in November, and his possible presidential candidacy.
“WE’RE GOING TO KEEP PUSHING FOR THOSE DOCUMENTS”
Before getting into electoral politics, I wondered whether Merkley saw any path to blocking Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Iowa’s own Senator Chuck Grassley scheduled Judiciary Committee hearings on President Donald Trump’s nominee this week. Merkley noted that many insiders didn’t think it would be possible to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. (He was one of the most vocal Senate critics of that trade agreement; the Obama administration finally gave up on gaining Congressional approval in late 2016.)
By the same token, “it looked like a done deal” when Republicans were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, with control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. Democrats kept opposing efforts to “undo health care for 20 or 30 million people,” eventually persuading GOP Senators John McCain and Susan Collins to block proposed legislation.
Merkley considers it “outrageous” and “an enormous abuse of the process” to consider this nominee when “the documents on his record are being screened–censored, really–by a Republican lawyer who worked for Kavanaugh.” (Hundreds of thousands of pages are being withheld, and 42,000 pages were released the night before hearings began.) “We’re going to keep pushing for those documents,” Merkley told me. Indeed, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee waged a “coordinated attack” on Grassley’s handling of the matter during the first hours of hearings on September 4.
What we already know about Kavanaugh provides “many reasons he should not serve,” Merely added: “his clear view to tear down Roe v Wade,” his “anti-consumer work,” hostility to workers’ ability to negotiate. Not only that, the nominee’s view of presidential power “is so expansive, it’s fit for a king in a kingdom, but not for a republic and a president.” Kavanaugh has argued the president shouldn’t be investigated, can’t be indicted, and has no obligation to follow a law he thinks is unconstitutional–even if courts have upheld the statute. This idea that the president is “beyond the law while serving” is nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, Merkley said. On the contrary, that concept is “exactly what George Washington feared.”
A FARM BILL, BUT NO DEAL ON IMMIGRATION
Since Merkley is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee for agriculture, I sought his insight on the state of play surrounding the Farm Bill. That legislation is in a conference committee after senators approved a bipartisan bill while House Republicans went in a much different direction.
Merkley enjoys the “very collaborative” work with his colleagues in this area. Trump’s draft budget would have cut vital farm programs, including agricultural research, conservation, and crop insurance, but “Democrats and Republicans on the Senate side worked together to essentially keep the status quo in place and improve on it.”
The “poison pills” in the House Farm Bill have made a deal before the election all but impossible. By separating food assistance from farm programs, House Republicans upended a “grand political compromise” that’s worked well for agriculture and hungry Americans for decades, in Merkley’s view. He expects conference talks to wrap up after the election, with the final Farm Bill close to the Senate approach.
While in Des Moines last September for the Progress Iowa Corn Feed, Merkley was optimistic Senate Democrats would be able to get the DREAM Act or something similar attached to a must-past bill before the end of 2017. It didn’t happen. Do Democrats have any leverage to help immigrants who have temporarily been shielded from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program?
Merkley sees immigration as a November 2018 election issue. Senators were “very close” to negotiating an immigration package with a DACA fix last year. The problem was the president: “Tuesday Trump” was on board with a deal, but “Thursday Trump” went into a rage, spurred by “two days of Breitbart beating him up” for considering any legal protection for DREAMers.
“EXTRAORDINARILY DARK MOMENTS”
Merkley went to Texas twice in June to investigate and sound the alarm about Trump’s family separation policy. Before visiting an immigrant detention center in Brownsville, Merkley thought “they can’t really be doing this.” He expected to find that federal officials’ “talk greatly exceeded their action.” Instead, he witnessed “extraordinarily dark moments” that stemmed from the administration “deciding to rip children away from their parents’ arms at the border.”
At a processing center, he found “kids being sorted into cages.” He was barred from entering a former Walmart where he had heard as many as 1,000 boys might be held. Returning on Father’s Day with other members of Congress, he learned that nearly 1,500 boys were in that building, up from about 300 a few months earlier. “The more that we found, the more bad things that were going on.”
Many parents were told their children were being taken to the bathroom or for a medical check, but the kids never returned. The detention center was “absolutely unprepared” for the population explosion. They were short on many supplies and urgently needed some 90 mental health counselors, but had trouble recruiting them. “That shows you the lack of planning and the callousness,” Merkley said. “Every aspect was callous.”
Although U.S. officials had claimed immigrants could seek asylum at any port of entry, Merkley learned on Father’s Day that border guards were blocking people without visas or passports from crossing the pedestrian bridge at Hidalgo. In other words, migrants were not allowed to present their case for asylum. Even worse, under new rules imposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, only those threatened by a foreign government are eligible for asylum, not immigrants at risk of being killed by a gang or criminal enterprise in their home country.
Since Merkley drew attention to this policy, many adults have approached him to describe their own traumatic experiences of family separation. “It’s very dark, and it’s very evil,” and he still finds it hard to believe that Sessions, Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and presidential adviser Stephen Miller thought this policy was a good idea.
The administration never had a plan for reuniting these families, Merkley said. A lot of parents were led to believe that if they gave up their asylum claim, they would soon see their children again. It was a lie. The ACLU has a team trying to connect parents with children detained in this country, but the task is “progressing really, really slowly” because the government didn’t collect good contact information before deporting asylum-seekers.
SENATE ACTIONS MERKLEY HELPED STOP
When I asked Merkley what else was worth watching for in the Senate, either before or after the election, he brought up two significant proposals he recently helped block. Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker drafted a new authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that “would have transferred the responsibility for declaring war essentially from Congress to the president.” The president could order military action against terrorism in any new area, and Congress would have needed a supermajority vote in both chambers to stop it “after the horse was out of the barn.” The idea had momentum and support from Democratic Senator Tim Kaine.
Merkley offered a different AUMF “that’s in sync with the Constitution.” By “dramatizing the contrast” and the potential “abdication of Article I powers,” he persuaded other senators to abandon Corker’s proposal.
Also this summer, Republicans wanted to add language to an appropriations bill that would “establish internment camps” for immigrant children who entered the country without authorization. Iowa’s Senators Grassley and Joni Ernst signed on to versions of that idea, seeking to override the 1997 Flores consent agreement prohibiting the detention of children for more than 20 days.
Merkley put up a separate amendment saying no, we are not going to allow internment camps under any circumstances. The upshot was “neither one got a vote, which was my whole intention, was to block them from doing that.” He said the Republican excuses for their proposal were not valid. Families don’t “disappear” if not detained; a study of the Family Case Management Program showed 98 percent of families showed up for their check-ins, and 100 percent showed up for their asylum hearings. “There’s no excuse for child separation under any moral code or religious tradition. There is no excuse for saying we’re going to throw families behind barbed wire like we did with Japanese-Americans during World War II. It’s just absolutely wrong. ”
“TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF GRASSROOTS ENERGY”
Having traveled extensively around the country and visited Iowa five times in the past year, what is Merkley’s big takeaway? “There’s a tremendous amount of grassroots energy.” On other trips, Democrats wondered if they would be able to sustain that energy through the election. “The answer now is clearly yes.” He’d be “terrified” if he were a Republican legislative leader.
This November’s election will be the first in living memory without an oval for straight-ticket voting near the top of the Iowa ballot. Oregon doesn’t have that option, so I asked Merkley how he thought the change might play out here. He speculated that people who feel more aggrieved and “determined to reclaim something that looks like the America we know and love, government by and for the people,” will be fired up to vote all the way down the ballot.
As a former speaker of the Oregon House, what would Merkley say to someone who wants Democrats to win but doesn’t feel comfortable knocking on doors or calling strangers on the phone? Those who hate cold-calling or persuasion calls can reach out in other ways, he said, for instance by contacting known Democratic supporters to recruit volunteers.
If partisan engagement is too daunting, Merkley added, people should look for different paths to be involved in their community. “You can be in despair, or you can be in the fight. And being in the fight is far better for your health, and far better for our collective good.” Maybe that means volunteering at a food bank or for Habitat for Humanity or by planting trees, every one of which will draw carbon dioxide out of the air. “Don’t sit home and just wallow in your despair. That’s not ok. That’s immoral.”
“MEDICARE FOR ALL” OR “CHOOSE MEDICARE”?
Merkley told me he has no specific time frame for deciding whether to run for president in 2020. He and his wife have been talking about it and will revisit the subject after the November election.
The question I have: Everybody who comes here [to Iowa] has a different life story and a different style. And I have no idea if my life story, my blue-collar roots and the battles I’ve fought on the environment, and on predatory lending, and equality, and this whole host of things–I don’t know if these things will resonate. Only one way to find out.
If they hadn’t resonated at all, then my life would be much less complicated right now. But it’s been a very good reception. And maybe that’s just the graciousness with which everyone in Iowa treats everyone, so we’ll try to figure that out.”
Health care reform is a top priority for many Democratic activists and will likely be a major theme of the next Iowa caucus campaign, so I asked Merkley to clarify his stance. The only sitting U.S. senator to endorse Bernie Sanders for president is a co-sponsor of Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, which would create a single-payer system. But in April, Merkley and Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced the Choose Medicare Act, which would allow individuals or employers to buy a Medicare policy on their state’s health insurance exchange. The concept is similar to the “public option” progressives sought when Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act.
What is Merkley’s preference, and which approach would he campaign on if he ran for president? “Medicare for All is a vision that I absolutely think makes so much sense, and have advocated for continuously. How do you get there?”
The Sanders bill starts with a descending age, a proposal floated when the Affordable Care Act was being drafted. For a week, Democrats thought they had 60 Senate votes in favor of lowering the Medicare age to 55. Then Senator Joe Lieberman “bailed on us,” and they were stuck because they needed a Republican to get the bill through.
Merkley still supports that concept, but he doesn’t want to put all his eggs in that basket.
This is the right time to think about every strategy so that we have done homework on a variety of ways to see what we can really make happen.
Do we go straight up the mountain? Do we zigzag back and forth? Do we circle in an upward path? How do we get there?
So this Choose Medicare [bill] is saying look, lots of people are already spending money on the exchange. Why not let them choose a Medicare policy? Lots of companies are already buying policies for their employees. Why not let them choose a Medicare policy?
The combination of those two things would give a Medicare option to the vast bulk of America. And because it’s voluntary, you aren’t being forced to choose it, we have a much better shot of getting the political votes that we need to make it happen.
But this is brainstorming over how to get there. And I think this is the right moment for brainstorming. Because when we find a window of opportunity, we won’t want to be, “Well, let’s start researching. If this path doesn’t work, what are the other paths?”
No. We already need to have developed a set of ideas so we can find one and make it happen before that window of opportunity closes.
I suspect a Medicare buy-in would have broader appeal in a state like Iowa, where the uninsured rate is relatively low. Many people are happy with their employer-provided coverage and wouldn’t want to give it up for a public plan. But why prevent others from buying into Medicare on the exchange?
Another reason Merkley wanted to develop this idea in more detail: Oregon has had success with what he described as a “public option for workers’ compensation.” The state accident insurance fund brought down rates for private workers’ compensation too, because it created more competition. He said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a former insurance commissioner of Rhode Island, told him adopting an Oregon-style program had halved workers’ comp rates in his state as well.
Merkley is confident that allowing individual consumers and businesses to choose Medicare would reduce costs for private insurance policies. Corporations in that sector would feel pressure to put more dollars into “real health care” rather than administrative expenses. “You can’t predict exactly how the planets will line up, but let’s be prepared with every idea having been worked through so we’re ready to seize the opportunity.”
COLLEGE COSTS, A “BANK HEIST,” AND GUARANTEED JOBS
Another debate often heard in Democratic circles: should the party push for tuition-free college, at least at public institutions? Or should the focus be on investing enough in higher education to make college debt-free for students?
Merkley said Oregon has very affordable community college for people who go straight from high school. Pell grants from the federal government cover a lot of the cost, so the state doesn’t have to kick in very much to make it happen. When he was leaving high school, the state invested enough in public universities that if you worked full-time and lived at home during the summer, you could save enough to nearly pay for the next year’s college tuition. It was close to debt-free.
“If we could do it 40 years ago, why can’t we do it today? It’s because we’re sending, essentially, the resources of the country to the richest Americans, rather than investing in the ability of families to thrive.” Merkley pointed to the “tax scam” Republicans approved late last year. “It’s the biggest bank heist in the history of this planet. A trillion and a half dollars” borrowed in order to shower more tax cuts on the wealthy. “It happened here in America. It shows you how corrupted our government has become through voter suppression, through gerrymandering, and through dark money in campaigns, Koch brother, cartel-style money in campaigns.”
Look at the three big things the Republican Congress did in 2017, Merkley said: the “bank heist,” a series of bills “to destroy health care for 30 million Americans,” and a successful effort to “steal a Supreme Court seat to maintain the corruption that exists right now. This is something I never anticipated seeing in the United States.”
Democrats urgently need to win back the Senate or presidency “to stop any more court-packing by these people who do not believe in the vision of our constitution.” The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t taken on gerrymandering, “opened the door to voter suppression” by striking down a large section of the Voting Rights Act, and opened the door to huge amounts of dark money through the Citizens United ruling.
I asked Merkley whether he would be open to a universal basic income program, which presidential candidate Andrew Yang is advocating. Yang maintains the old Democratic prescriptions of education and job retraining give people false hope, because the well-paying jobs aren’t coming back and retraining programs mostly don’t work.
“I really like the idea of guaranteed jobs. There is so much work to be done in our country,” Merkley said. For instance, Oregon has millions of acres of second-growth forests that are prone to burning. They need “massive amounts of thinning to restore something similar to a normal forest. Well, that’s a hell of a lot of jobs in the woods. It’s not that everybody should move to Oregon and work in the woods, but it’s just an example of work that needs to be done.”
Yes, yes, types of jobs that pay well with benefits. And the reason I lean in that direction, of jobs being created in the cities and wherever, is because a job creates structure to your life. It creates pride. It creates–a job is much more than just the income. It is a key part of the foundation for a thriving family. A check is not the same thing.
“WE HAVE TO RIP AWAY THE COVER THEY HIDE BEHIND”
Some Democrats believe the party needs a tougher stance against Republicans. At the recent Iowa Democratic Wing Ding in Clear Lake, possible presidential candidates Michael Avenatti and Representative Tim Ryan promised to fight the GOP and Trump. In contrast, a major theme of Representative John Delaney’s presidential campaign is that Democrats should be more bipartisan to build a broader coalition, as many voters are turned off by divisive politics. Where does Merkley see himself in this debate?
We need to use every tool we have to reclaim our country. We are at the verge of a tipping point, and maybe we’re almost past it, in which the power of the mega-wealthy is so profound that we can’t tip the balance back in to we the people. And this is what I mean by, if we don’t understand that the dark money in campaigns is a strategy of the rich to keep controlling, buying Congress–you don’t have government by and for the people if people can basically buy the elections with massive infusions of cash.
Money doesn’t always determine election outcomes, but we saw in 2014 that the Koch brothers put hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. Senate races, including in Iowa, in order to “become the Senate puppet-masters,” Merkley said. “They use these front groups” like Freedom Partners and Generation Opportunity. When they started attacking him in Oregon, he told his team, “We’ve got to punch back. We’ve got to rip away their facade.” Merkley recalled, “My team was terrified”–the dark money groups had put in $5 million, but they could put in $50 million. “I wrote the ad, because my team didn’t want to.” Here’s that television commercial:
Script: “The out of state oil billionaire Koch brothers have come to Oregon, spending millions on deceptive attack ads to elect Monica Wehby. Because Wehby and the Koch brothers share an agenda that will cost us. An agenda that guts the Clean Air Act. That gives more tax breaks to millionaires. And rewards corporations that ship American jobs overseas. Monica Wehby may be a good investment for the Koch brothers, but she’s the wrong choice for Oregon.”
The strategy worked, Merkley said. The groups left a month later.
We kicked them out of our state, and we need to kick them out of every state, but we have to rip away the cover they hide behind. They do not want to be exposed in that fashion. So let’s expose them. And that means we have to fight.
This isn’t about being gracious. This is about saying raw political power from the wealthy is destroying the concept of our government, our we-the-people government, and we want our America back. It’s our America, and we want a we-the-people republic, not government by and for the Koch brothers.
Along those lines, Merkley described his years of work in the Oregon House to take on payday lenders. Those loans of 300 percent, 400 percent, sometimes 500 percent interest rates created “a vortex of debt that sucks you down into bankruptcy.” For eight years as a member of the minority party, he pushed for reform. “So, I lost. I lost, I lost, I lost, I lost. And then I became speaker. And then I won. But I won, I think, by one vote.” During that fight, some Oregon lawmakers said these payday lending companies create jobs. He had to demonstrate that the business model destroys more jobs.
In the U.S. Senate, he worked intensely on the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. One battle was against “liar loans,” when advisers got kickbacks for steering people into subprime mortgages on false pretenses. The deals often ended in foreclosure, cheating consumers out of “the most important investment to building wealth for middle-class families.”
You don’t defeat powerful interest groups “by being nice. You take it on by laying out what’s wrong and carrying the fight and holding people accountable,” Merkley said. “Are you going to stand for this predatory assault on America’s families? Or are you going to stand with us and end this practice? […] You’ve got to clarify the battle lines.”
I had one more question about a fault line in Democratic activist circles: should candidates talk mostly about economic issues and less about so-called “identity politics” (such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ equality, racial justice), in order to win back white working-class voters who drifted to Trump?
Merkley rejected that as a false choice. It’s “absolutely clear” that Democrats can fight for justice “on multiple fronts at the same time.” Working families “have gotten the short end of the stick for four decades.” We should be crafting an infrastructure bill to put people to work and taking on trade in a constructive way, not “throwing bricks” that come back to hurt our agricultural exports. “We can fight for fairness in incarceration” and also fight for health care, living wage jobs, housing, debt-free college and other “key issues for working families.”
“THE GOAL HAS TO BE TO END THE BURNING OF FOSSIL FUELS”
Before our interview ended, Merkley wanted to talk about climate change, an issue he’s focused on in the Senate. “You see the impacts of a warming planet everywhere.” Oregon is experiencing longer and “more horrific fire seasons,” destroying forests and producing smoke that hurts the economy. Other parts of the country have had more intense hurricanes, floods, droughts, or soil erosion. The estimated damage from climate-related incidents in the U.S. last year was $300 billion.
“We have a responsibility to take on the driving force of carbon pollution,” Merkley said. He’s sponsored legislation designed to keep more fossil fuels in the ground and strive for generating 100 percent of energy from clean, renewable sources. We can’t think in terms of “a little more energy conservation in appliances or better mileage in cars” anymore. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have gone up 100 parts per million in his lifetime. “The goal has to be to end the burning of fossil fuels,” and we need to puruse it intensely.
Reorienting the energy economy would create millions of jobs, maybe tens of millions of jobs, Merkley added. Plus, the energy economy would be “cheaper than what we have now,” because wind and solar are now cheaper than fossil fuels. Renovating house creates a lot of jobs.
Democrats couldn’t get a cap-and-trade bill through the Senate when they had 60 votes. Does Merkley believe we need to think about a carbon tax? Merkley sees a lot of potential support for some form of carbon tax, which is simpler and would be more fair than the ill-fated cap-and-trade proposal of 2009/2010. But “we shouldn’t think about that instrument alone,” he said. We need to find ways to allow people to generate more electricity with small-scale wind or solar. That’s a good economic investment. We need utilities to work with us on allowing more distributed solar. “It’s better economically, better environmentally, and better for jobs.”
The argument against such policies is that electricity bills will go up quickly, but climate change seems like a distant problem. “We have to shatter several of the myths that the Koch brothers have promoted to try to basically destroy renewable energy,” Merkley countered. They claim that if we act on climate change, other countries won’t. But they are acting. China and India are going through dramatic changes. Nor are renewables more costly. A Colorado energy company put out a request for proposals and found wind and solar was cheaper than generating electricity in an already-depreciated coal-fired power plant. Let’s allow people to put a solar field in an empty lot, or a solar canopy above parking lots, or community solar projects for school roofs.
Merkley sees an opening to reach some voters who are not ready to acknowledge the climate is changing. Even if you’re not ready to say we need to solve that problem, “stand with people’s right to produce their own energy, fight for the opportunity to renovate our energy industry to get that cheaper energy and to create those jobs.”
For those who want to hear what a potential Jeff Merkley stump speech might sound like, here’s the full audio clip of his remarks as the featured guest speaker at the Progress Iowa Corn Feed in Des Moines in September 2017.
The next chance for Iowans to meet Merkley will be at the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry on Saturday, September 29. The other three headliners at that event will be Representative John Delaney of Maryland (who has been campaigning for president in Iowa for the past year), Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and former advisor to President Barack Obama Alyssa Mastromonaco.
Top image: Iowa House candidate Heather Matson (left) and Iowa Democratic Party First Vice Chair Andrea Phillips watch Senator Jeff Merkley speak to activists at a field office opening in Ankeny on September 3. Cropped from a photo by Amber Gustafson, used with permission.
With just seven weeks remaining before election day, “No Republican organization has put money toward TV ads that could benefit” U.S. Representative Rod Blum in Iowa’s first Congressional district, Barbara Rodriguez and Brianne Pfannenstiel reported for the Des Moines Register on September 17. Their analysis of television air time data from Kantar Media showed that groups supporting Democratic challenger Abby Finkenauer “have spent or reserved more than $1.2 million for airing political ads” in IA-01. Blum’s campaign has placed $129,000 in television ad buys, and no GOP-aligned groups have indicated plans to advertise in the district.
In many battleground Congressional races, candidates run mostly positive tv ads, while outside groups pay for the hatchet jobs. That normal division of labor won’t be available to Blum. He will have to cover the cost of any negative ads about Finkenauer from his own campaign funds, leaving less money to make an case for himself on the air.
Outside spending in IA-01 topped $5.2 million during the 2016 election cycle. Expenditures benefiting Blum made up a little more than half the total. The National Republican Congressional Committee (the main campaign arm of U.S. House Republicans) spent more than $1.5 million and the 501(c)4 organization American Action Network nearly $700,000 against Democratic nominee Monica Vernon. In contrast, the only organization to report spending on Blum’s behalf in 2018 is the House Freedom Fund, which chipped in a little more than $31,000. Groups opposing Blum have already spent more than three quarters of a million dollars in the district.
The spending patterns indicate a growing sense among Washington politicos that Blum’s seat cannot be saved, in light of national trends and a House Ethics Committee investigation. This month, every major election forecaster downgraded Blum’s chances for winning a third term. The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved the IA-01 race from toss-up to lean Democrat. Inside Elections/Roll Call moved it from toss-up to tilt Democratic. In early September, FiveThirtyEight.com’s House forecast called IA-01 a lean Democrat race, giving Finkenauer a 5 in 7 chance of winning. As of September 17, the site labeled this district “likely Democrat,” with a 14 in 15 chance of victory for Finkenauer.
Finkenauer has released three television commercials so far (I’ve enclosed the videos below), but her campaign has spent only $28,000 on television air time, according to the review by Rodriguez and Pfannenstiel. Meanwhile, other groups supporting the Democrat will spend more than $1 million. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is responsible for about half of the air time purchased or reserved to boost Finkenauer’s chances this fall, though the DCCC may scale back its advertising plans somewhat. The super-PAC Change Now, Inc has reported more than $566,000 in spending against Blum, and the House Majority PAC just under $159,000.
Blum’s campaign has released four television commercials in recent weeks; scroll down to watch. The latest spot, a testimonial by a man with disabilities whom Blum assisted, was by far the most successful in my opinion.
Any comments about the IA-01 race are welcome in this thread. Libertarian Troy Hageman will also be on the ballot here. The 20 counties in the district (map) contain 162,660 active registered Democrats, 139,913 Republicans, and 186,753 no-party voters, according to the latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.
Final note: Bleeding Heartland discussed here a few factors that favor Blum. For those reasons, Democrats should not take this race for granted.
The first Abby Finkenauer ad, “Dinner table,” focused on her family:
Union member Tom Townsend was featured in the second Finkenauer ad, “Tom”:
In her campaign’s third spot, “Caller ID,” Finkenauer recalled learning the union rep’s name as a child, because when that person called their family’s home phone, it meant her father had a job.
The same opening segment appears in another Blum ad, “Respect.”
In “Teamwork in Washington,” Blum says, “Let’s stop fighting and start working together.” His plan: “pro-growth, pro-business policies,” “boost our economy with lower taxes and less red tape,” “protect Iowa jobs by securing the border and stopping illegal immigration,” and “reform Washington by passing term limits and cutting politicians’ pay.”
The latest Blum ad, “Jake,” is a testimonial by Jake Hesselman, who was having problems with Social Security.
SEPTEMBER 20 UPDATE: A New York Times poll of this race showed Finkenauer ahead of Blum by 52 percent to 37 percent, outside the survey’s margin of error.
Finkenauer’s campaign released a new commercial called “Trust.” In the spot, she promised to protect Social Security and Medicare and let Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices. She also bashed Blum’s vote for a bill that would have allowed insurance companies to charge older people higher premiums, which AARP denounced as an “age tax.”
Blum’s campaign has released three new spots this week. Two are hits on Finkenauer. Here’s “No apology,” highlighting votes Finkenauer missed in the Iowa House and the fact that she hasn’t passed any bills (unstated: because she’s been in the minority party). The alleged ethics violation relates to Finkenauer’s failure to report a change of employment within 30 days of starting a new job. She said she was unaware of that new reporting requirement on Iowa House disclosure forms.
“Radical” alleges that Finkenauer wants to eliminate private health insurance–a false charge. I’ve seen Finkenauer speak many times and have never heard her advocate for single-payer health care, often called “Medicare for All.” Last month I asked her campaign manager Kane Miller about her stand on hat issue and received this reply:
Abby has always supported and worked to improve health care for Iowans, and believes a strong private insurance market with affordable plans that cover those with pre-existing conditions as well as preventive care such as cancer screenings is essential. She has been clear in supporting the addition of a public option, such as a Medicare buy-in for people under 65, as the best way to make healthcare more affordable.
In any event, here’s the deceptive Blum ad.
The last new Blum spot, “Floodwall,” focuses on his efforts to obtain federal funding for a flood wall in Cedar Rapids. The commercial doesn’t mention that $41 million of the $117 million in federal funds will be a low-interest loan rather than a grant.
U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley told reporters today that he will lead the Senate Finance Committee in the new Congress. The current chair, Senator Orrin Hatch, is retiring. Grassley’s official website notes,
Senator Grassley calls this committee the quality of life committee because of the committee’s jurisdiction, which includes all tax matters, health care, Social Security; Medicare, Medicaid, social services, unemployment compensation, tariffs and international trade. Legislation acted on by the Committee on Finance raises virtually all federal revenue, and expenditures authorized by this committee represent as much as two-thirds of the federal budget.
“The economy is better than it’s been in years and there’s a sense of optimism about the future of our country that people haven’t felt in a long time thanks to the pro-growth policies of a Republican President and a Republican majority in Congress,” Grassley said. “Looking ahead, at the Finance Committee, I want to continue to work to make sure that as many Americans as possible get to experience this good economy for themselves.”
Iowa’s senior senator chaired the Finance Committee during part of George W. Bush’s presidency and was ranking member when Democrats controlled the Senate in 2001-2002 and 2007-2010. His most influential act as ranking member was sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. Grassley strung then-Finance chair Max Baucus and President Barack Obama along for months, pretending to negotiate in good faith and winning many concessions as Democrats drafted the health care reform law. All the while, he fundraised on a promise to block “Obama-care” and mischaracterized the bill with talking points like “pull the plug on grandma.”
Grassley switched to ranking member on Senate Judiciary after the 2010 election. As chair of that committee since January 2015, he has shattered many long-held norms. Under the first year of Grassley’s leadership, the committee confirmed the fewest judicial nominees in a half-century. The next year, Grassley refused to give Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, which was unprecedented. In his third year as Judiciary chair, Grassley helped confirm a record number of President Donald Trump’s court picks and shredded the “blue slip” convention, which long allowed senators to block judicial nominees from their home states.
Senator Lindsey Graham is widely expected to succeed Grassley as Judiciary chair. He has transformed over the past two years from one of Trump’s most vocal critics in Congress to a leading enabler for the president.
Grassley will replace Hatch as senate president pro tempore, a position that traditionally goes to the member of the majority caucus with the most seniority.
House Democrats voted by secret ballot, supporting Pelosi by a 203 to 32 margin. The binding vote for House speaker will be in January, when the new Congress convenes. Pelosi is not guaranteed to have the votes she will need on the House floor, but no Democratic rival has stepped up to run for speaker, as Matt Laslo explained at VICE and Matt Fuller did at the Huffington Post. But she’s in a stronger position than two years ago, when 63 members of a significantly smaller caucus voted for Tim Ryan to be minority leader. Pelosi has already won over a number of Democrats who had vowed to oppose her only a few weeks ago.
Dave Loebsack’s first term representing IA-02 in the House coincided with Pelosi’s ascension to the speaker’s chair in 2007, and he always seemed likely to support her again. His name never appeared on any list of Pelosi critics (sometimes dubbed the #FiveWhiteGuys). But Loebsack had not confirmed his support until November 28. His spokesperson said in a statement to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, “Since November, Dave has wanted anyone who was interested in running for a leadership position to have a chance to step up. As you know, Nancy Pelosi is the only Democrat who stepped forward and Dave is now supporting her for Speaker of the House.”
Representative-elect Abby Finkenauer (IA-01) also had not declared her plans regarding the speaker vote, but her staff released this statement on November 28.
“Over the course of my campaign to represent the people of northeast Iowa in Congress, I made it clear that I was running so that we could get Washington working for Iowa families again. In every corner of the district, I heard so many sharing similar concerns: ever-increasing healthcare costs, the need for serious investment in infrastructure, and the importance of expanding skills and apprenticeships training so we can bring good-paying jobs to northeast Iowa. Meeting with voters face-to-face in living rooms, coffee shops, parades, and in all parts of the district made me more determined than ever to get to work and get things done, just as Iowans wake up and do every single day.
“I’m deeply honored that the people of the first district have allowed me to be their voice as we get Washington to work on finding solutions for these real issues. I said throughout the campaign that my support for any candidate for leadership would depend on serious conversations about how we can get things done for the people I’ve been entrusted to represent, and in the last few weeks as member-elect, I’ve been having those conversations so that I can make sure northeast Iowa’s concerns are heard loud and clear by everyone seeking positions of leadership in the next Congress.
“There has been considerable attention paid in particular to who Democrats would nominate as Speaker of the House. Since I was elected to get things done instead of playing political games, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I will be voting for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. I have her word that she is dedicated to protecting Social Security and Medicare, and understands the importance of investing in skills training and apprenticeship programs as well as infrastructure. We need leadership that can get it done. It’s time to unite as a country to move forward and bring common sense and decency to our government and our politics.
“I look forward to working hard every day to make sure the voices of Iowans are heard every step of the way and our priorities stay at the forefront of the agenda of the 116th Congress.”
Representative-elect Cindy Axne (IA-03) declined to endorse anyone for speaker during the campaign, when Republicans spent heavily on radio and television commercials tying her to Pelosi. On November 27 she signed the following open letter with 19 other first-term Democrats.
We, as incoming Members-elect, are writing to formally declare our support for Leader Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House in the 116th Congress.
For all of us, the path to Congress was one rooted in the good we want to do for the people in our communities. Together, we will work towards making health care affordable, reinvesting in the middle class, and changing our political system.
Leader Pelosi’s work has made a difference in the lives of people we all represent. As Speaker, she delivered health care to millions of Americans, and voters put us back into the majority largely because of our promises to protect and expand people’s access to that care. Her experience in moving legislation forward on this issue will be crucial as we work to improve our healthcare system, reduce the costs of prescription drugs, and ensure that everyone can afford high-quality healthcare. As we fight for strong gun violence prevention laws that keep our kids and communities safe, as we address immigration reform and protect our Dreamers, and as we begin to restore faith in government, we need leadership at the helm who knows how to get things done. We are confident that Leader Pelosi is committed to working in a bipartisan fashion whenever possible without compromising our values, and will help us start to change the tone and rhetoric coming out of Washington.
The incoming class of first-term members is younger and more diverse than ever before. A proven leader like Leader Pelosi will be a valuable resource as we, ourselves, step up to lead, and as we work to make life better for the people we represent.
More than anything, we were elected to deliver. Let’s move forward. Let’s make change happen, together.
The case for House Democrats to dump Pelosi is weak. So what if she’s a hate figure for the right-wing noise machine? Republicans suffered a net loss of 40 seats after attempting to make many House races a referendum on the California Democrat. If Democrats threw Pelosi overboard, Fox News and conservative talk radio would simply demonize the next speaker. As Charles Pierce wrote in this excellent commentary, “The only argument that the #FiveWhiteGuys have that might resonate with their new progressive colleagues is that Pelosi is old and has been in Congress for a long time. Period. That’s not enough to dispense with the party’s most effective legislative leader since Lyndon Johnson.”
This week, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2020, which revives a call to repeal the Affordable Care Act and lays out massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration’s budget reveals just how steadfast it remains in trying to take away Americans’ health care.
Here are five things you need to know about Trump’s Health Care Sabotage Budget:
1. President Trump’s Budget Revives The Failed Graham-Cassidy Repeal Bill That Would Repeal Medicaid Expansion And ACA Subsidies Only To Replace Them With Inadequate Block Grants, Ultimately Cutting Medicaid By More Than $1 Trillion.
By shifting to a block grant program and eliminating funding for Medicaid expansion, the administration would cut Medicaid by more than $1 trillion over 10 years.
[Editor’s note: The U.S. Senate never voted on Graham-Cassidy, but Governor Kim Reynolds endorsed the legislation.]
2. The Budget Would Impose Onerous Work Requirements On Medicaid Enrollees Nationwide, Which Is Estimated To Cause Up To 4 Million People To Lose Coverage.
This unprecedented move would completely alter Medicaid as we know it, requiring people nationwide to meet onerous work and reporting requirements in order to maintain their Medicaid coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation has estimated that a national Medicaid work requirement would cause up to 4 million people to lose coverage, most of them losing coverage due to paperwork and red tape.
3. The President’s Budget Could Impose Premiums On Up To 4.2 Million Low-Income Uninsured People Who Are Currently Eligible For A Plan That Requires $0 In Premiums.
As CQ’s Mary Ellen McIntire noted, “The budget proposes all exchange enrollees who are eligible for subsidies ‘contribute something’ to their coverage, meaning people who currently pay $0 in premiums would have to make some sort of payment. Kaiser found that could apply to 4.2M uninsured.” (Click here for the Kaiser report.)
4. Trump’s budget would slash funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, the department responsible for administering the Affordable Care Act, by 12 percent.
As Caitlin Emma and Jennifer Scholtes reported for Politico, the budget request “assumes that Congress will succeed in repealing and replacing Obamacare.”
5. The Budget Proposes Cutting More Than $800 Billion From Medicare Over A Decade.
Kimberly Graham is the first declared Democratic challenger to U.S. Senator Joni Ernst. Her campaign website is kimberlyforiowa.com, and she’s on Facebook and Twitter @KimberlyforIowa. -promoted by Laura Belin
Our current junior senator ran on a promise to get rid of corruption in Washington and “make ‘em squeal,” but the only people squealing are Iowans harmed by her votes.
My name is Kimberly Graham. I’m running for the United States Senate. Here’s who I am, who I’m running for, and why:
I’m the daughter of a Marine and union worker. I’m the daughter of a teen mom who was a clerk typist at the phone company. I was born at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. I’m the granddaughter of a WWII vet who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. My paternal grandmother was from Mt. Ayr. My maternal grandmother grew up in Winnebago, Minnesota. My maternal great-great grandparents owned a farm in Zearing, east of Ames.
Like former governor and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, I wasn’t born here, but I got here as soon as I could. I chose to live in Indianola for 24 years and chose to raise our son there. Our son is a smart and kind young man and an Eagle Scout. His father and I divorced amicably when he was 7 and along with our son’s paternal grandparents, the best people I’ve ever met, we worked together to raise him.
I’ve been working since I was 14. I worked in a dry cleaners, cleaned houses, waitressed, worked in retail stores and was a flight attendant and active union member and organizer with the the APFA. I’m a first generation college student and had to take out student loans to afford tuition. I’ve spent my career advocating for kids and parents and as a mediator. I currently represent abused or neglected kids as their attorney and guardian ad litem in the Recovery Court program.
Here’s why I’m running and who I’m running for:
I’m running for every couple and every single mom and dad who can’t afford medical insurance. Who earn too much to get Medicaid, but not enough to pay insurance premiums, high cost deductibles, co-pays and prescriptions.
I’m running for every middle income family effectively impoverished by the costs of medical insurance and care. As a single mom, I remember getting the slim envelope every April from Blue Cross Blue Shield, the one I’d open with dread because it was the annual premium increase letter.
My brother had appendicitis years ago and was refused medical care because he had no insurance. Thank goodness a friend drove him to a county hospital, where he had emergency surgery that saved his life. He could have been another casualty of lack of insurance.
We need a senator who doesn’t vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act without having a solid plan in place that is better and more affordable.
We need Medicare for All. Now.
I’m running for those who can’t afford the absurd cost of insulin and for those who have died from rationing it to make it stretch. In this, the wealthiest nation on earth, shame on our representatives who have the power to fix this and and won’t. We need a senator who will take on drug companies and drug prices.
We need lower prescription drug prices. Now.
I’m running for people in rural communities and for family farmers, who are watching neighbor after neighbor fall on harder and harder times, schools consolidating, hospitals in financial trouble, local businesses closing, and their kids and grandkids packing up and moving to the city or to another state.
We need a senator who will stand up for rural communities and small businesses, and who won’t support trade wars and mega-mergers that harm them. We need a senator who has a vision of a revitalized and vibrant rural Iowa, a vision where small towns have excellent local schools, local hospitals, abundant housing, affordable day care, and a lot of good paying jobs.
We need a senator who works to see that vision through. Now.
I’m running for every Iowan who is tired of name-calling, incivility and disrespect. We are all Iowans and all Americans. We won’t always agree but we can disagree respectfully.
My grandmother was a lifelong Republican who said the only Democrat she’d ever vote for would be me. My grandma meant everything to me. Growing up, she spent summers at her grandparents’ farm in Zearing. She told me so many great stories – including the one about her grandma letting her roller skate back and forth in the farmhouse kitchen. I’ve digressed, but my point is, as I heard a friend say recently “it’s hard to hate someone up close.”
Iowans get to know each other “up close” at our kids’ baseball games, places of worship, chatting in the aisle at Fareway or Hy-Vee and at work or in school. We have a lot in common, no matter who we’ve voted for. And …make no mistake. We can model civility for our kids and stand up for social and racial justice. We don’t have to agree with, empathize with, or condone someone’s opinions or votes to be civil and respectful. Never mistake my kindness for a lack of backbone. It’s possible to be respectful and stand up for what’s right at the same time.
We’ve got to work together and stand together for what’s right. We need a senator who stands up for civility and respect, who refuses to support anyone who name-calls and insults others and we need a senator who will unite us. Now.
There’s a proverb* which says: “If you need to go fast, go alone, but if you need to go far, go together.”
We have a very long way to go, so let’s go together. Together we can reclaim our democracy, restore and preserve voting rights, get big money out of politics, make progress on civil, human, LGTBQ+ and disability rights and forward social justice.
Together we can make progress on criminal justice reform, take better care of our military service members and veterans, pass common sense gun laws the majority of Iowans want, work for clean air and water, and take massive action on climate change for a sustainable future and more jobs.
Together we can create a healthier and more democratic economy, a thriving middle class, make Medicare for all a reality and so much more.
We have a long way to go and a lot to do! Imagine grabbing your backpack and putting on your walking shoes. If you’re from Iowa, maybe you’ve seen a gravel road or two. Imagine that road in front of us. See it? It’s a long one with a lot of hills and not much shade.
It won’t be fast.
It won’t be easy.
But we can make it, together.
Please join us for a campaign announcement event on Tuesday, May 14, at 5:30 p.m. at Buxton Park in Indianola. We hope to see you there!
This campaign is By the People, For the People. I hope to be your senator, the #BestSenatorMoneyCantBuy. As I travel around the state this summer on my 99 county Ride for Democracy tour, I want to talk with you. I need to know what’s most important to your family. Please follow the Ride for Democracy at www.kimberlyforiowa.com, email the campaign if you would like to volunteer at info@kimberlyforiowa.com or contribute to the campaign via the “contribute now” buttons on the web site.
