It's Time to Put American Families and Small Businesses in Control of Their Own Health Care

According to a report released yesterday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, President Obama's proposal for health insurance reform will provide insurance for 32,000,000 Americans -- more than the populations of Arizona, Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia combined -- thus guaranteeing that 95 percent of working Americans will be covered.

President Obama's health insurance reform plan will:

* Make health insurance affordable for middle-class households and small businesses -- including the largest middle-class tax cuts for health care in history -- reducing premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

* Strengthen consumer protections and reins in insurance-company abuses.

* Give millions of Americans the same types of private insurance choices that members of Congress will have -- through a new, competitive health insurance market that keeps costs down.

* Hold insurance companies accountable to keep premiums down and prevent denials of care and coverage, including for pre-existing conditions.

* Improve Medicare benefits -- with lower prescription drug costs for those in the "donut hole," better chronic care, free preventive care, and nearly a decade more of solvency for Medicare.

* Trim the federal deficit by $130 billion over next 10 years, and $1.2 trillion dollars over the following decade -- reining in waste, fraud and abuse; overpayments to insurance companies; and by paying for quality over quantity of care.

As President Obama says, "We must act now" and put American families and small businesses -- not health insurance companies -- in control of their own health care.

For more information, go to:

* Americans for Stable Quality Care: http://www.stablequalitycare.org/

* CNN/Health Care in America: http://bit.ly/HealthCareInAmerica

* HealthReform.gov: http://www.healthreform.gov/

* Kaiser Family Foundation: http://healthreform.kff.org/

By all accounts, the final-stretch vote on health insurance reform will happen as soon as this Sunday [March 21]. To encourage your U.S. senators and representatives in Congress to pass this historic health reform legislation, please visit the following website for contact info: http://bit.ly/ElectedOfficials

SOURCES: Congressional Budget Office, Politico, U.S. Census Bureau, USA.gov, The White House
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Congressional Budget Office Report: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Go to Contractors in 'Unprecedented Level of Dependence on Private Firms' in Iraq

According to a new Congressional Budget Office report, one in every five dollars devoted to Iraq has gone to private contractors, who now have more people in Iraq than the U.S. military does. [The accompanying graphic depicts U.S. government obligations for contracts in the Iraq theater -- in billions of dollars.] The New York Times describes this as "a second, private, army...one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view."

As chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Sen. Norm Coleman failed to hold a single hearing on the waste, fraud, and abuse that sabotaged the reconstruction of Iraq.

"Whenever Norm Coleman is put in charge of Minnesota tax dollars, you can be sure there are corporate special interests getting a big payday," declared Al Franken, Democratic challenger for the U.S. Senate seat that Coleman has held since 2003. "But it's simply unconscionable that he allowed our troops to be put at risk, just so that his cronies could cash in. Instead of being a watchdog, Norm Coleman was a lapdog – and, every day, we learn more about the cost of his inaction."

The New York Times reports: "The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration's unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released Tuesday [Aug. 12, 2008].

"The Pentagon's reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops."

A defense contracting expert, Peter Singer, noted, "We have just handed over functions to contractors in a very haphazard way."

And Sen. Byron Dorgan [D-N.D.] said what Al Franken has been saying for years: "It's unfathomable to me that we don't have a bipartisan investigative committee on contracting in Iraq."

This, like so many other Tales from the Oversight-Free Zone, took place while Chairman Coleman, who accepted campaign contributions from Halliburton -- described as "the largest Pentagon contractor in Iraq" -- sat idly by.

Coleman Took $4,000 From Halliburton's PAC
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2001 and 2002, Coleman's U.S. Senate campaign accepted four $1,000 contributions from Halliburton's political action committee. Hmm-m-m...

GoodBiz113's take: As any small-business subcontractor can attest, trying to do business with a federal agency can be challenging -- even to score a five- or six-figure deal. The multimillion- and multibillion-dollar no-bid contracts that the Bush administration has awarded Halliburton, Blackwater and other prime contractors is, point-blank, deplorable. It's time for a changing of the political guard -- in Congress and the White House -- to get our country back on a fiscally accountable, transparent and prosperous track for all.

SOURCES: Center for Responsive Politics, Congressional Budget Office, New York Times
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