This is a proposed political ad for our upcoming election to be paid for by a proposed political action committee named Pre-Existing Conditions Political Action Committee (PEC PAC).
PEC PAC commercial — Take One. Continue reading
Category Archives: employer mandate
Health Reform and Answers from Iowa Candidates
Over the past months I have been inundated with requests for campaign contributions, and I looked for a way in which to make informed decisions about which candidates to support. In last month’s blog post, I shared two questions I posed to Iowa candidates running for U.S. Congress, the Iowa governorship, and the Iowa Legislature. The questions asked were an effort to engender better knowledge of just two of the complex issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). At that time, I said I would make a $1,000 campaign contribution to the candidate who provided the most-specific answers to my questions and allow the responses to be posted on this blog. If I received thoughtful responses from several candidates, the $1000 contribution would be shared.
To date, I have received only one response, that of Senator Jack Hatch, who is running for Iowa governor. I have posted his response below. I sincerely appreciate Senator Hatch’s response. The opportunity for candidates to submit a response to my questions remains open until August 15. S.S. McClure, editor and publisher of McClure’s Magazine, once said, “The vitality of democracy depends on popular knowledge of complex questions.” I seek candidates’ answers for just two of the many complex questions surrounding the ACA. Please let the candidates you support know about this campaign-contribution opportunity. Help me share “popular knowledge about complex questions.”
A Culture of Coverage and Health Reform
(This month’s blog post is the text of an article that I was asked to write for a professional publication.)
As chair of the Iowa Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Commission, I was responsible for helping to guide Iowa’s anti-smoking efforts by following a mission statement created by the Iowa Legislature that read, “to foster a social and legal climate in which tobacco use becomes undesirable and unacceptable.” In this same vein of using legislation to create social change, I will review the actions derived from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, in Iowa. From this family physician’s reading of the ACA, I submit that the underlying social change goal is to create a “culture of coverage,” which means that, within certain constraints, the citizens of the United States, and residents of Iowa in particular, will have the expectation that they have health coverage and that they will, in part, be responsible for securing that health coverage.
Obviously this 2,000-page law has many more elements, approaches, and objectives, but for me, this “culture of coverage” is the overarching goal. It is with this goal in mind that I discuss what I perceive as the unfolding of the ACA in Iowa.