Campaign season normally isn't the time for nuanced positions on healthcare policy. But no one told Alexi Giannoulias.
The Democrat vying to fill the Illinois Senate seat vacated by President Obama said this week that he wants to allow the government to negotiate drug prices on behalf of the nation's Medicare beneficiaries — a "missed opportunity," he said, in the Democrats' new healthcare law.
"There's a lot more to be done," Giannoulias told David Gregory Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"I would have loved to have seen a provision there to let the Secretary of Health and Human Services negotiate … drug rates for Medicare the way that the [Veterans Affairs Department] does."
As part of the 2003 law creating Medicare's prescription drug benefit, Republican leaders explicitly prohibited HHS from using the bulk-purchasing power of Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors and taxpayers.
Several attempts to eliminate the prohibition have failed since Part D took effect in 2006, and the $80 billion deal cut last year between Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the pharmaceutical lobby undermined any real effort to include the change in the healthcare reform bill.
Rep. Mark Kirk (Ill.), the Republican vying for Obama's Senate seat, said he wants to repeal the healthcare law and replace it with alternative reforms, including provisions to rein in malpractice suits and allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines.
Giannoulias was quick to defend the reform bill overall, arguing that the coverage expansion and consumer protections central to the law are long overdue.
"Morally we shouldn't have 51 million Americans without affordable, basic health care," he said.
An Oregon Republican running for the House recently compared the Democrats' healthcare reform bill to the Fugitive Slave Act.
Republican Scott Bruun, who is challenging freshman Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), told a crowd in Canby, Ore., during an Oct. 7 speech that the healthcare bill was "right up there" with the infamous slave act.
The bill, passed in 1850, required any runaway slaves who had escaped their bondage and were living free in the Northern states be returned to their owners.
"I would argue that from a fiscal perspective, it's probably the worst piece of legislation this nation's ever passed," Bruun said during a speech that was recorded by a Democratic campaign tracker.
The audience clapped its approval, but then Bruun continued.
"From a social perspective, it's right up there, I would argue — probably the fugitive slave law was worse," he added. "But still, the healthcare bill was pretty darn bad."
Democratic congressional candidate Timothy Bagwell is asking why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and his opponent Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) — steered millions of dollars toward a Chicago-area nonprofit that's under investigation.
Bagwell sent an 8-page letter to Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel Levinson on Monday requesting that the office "review and determine" whether $3.3 million awarded to the Save-A-Life Foundation were "properly administered." Bagwell also sent a letter to Shimkus last month asking him to investigate the nonprofit for which he helped secure $1.5 million in 2004 and 2005.
Save-A-Life, which provides first-aid training classes to school students, is under investigation by the Illinois Attorney General's Charitable Trusts Bureau.
Bagwell also wants the inspector general to review the relationship between the nonprofit and CDC Deputy Director Douglas Browne, who served as the nonprofit's corporate treasurer from 2004 to 2009.
Joe Miller, the Republican vying for Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R) seat in Alaska, is declining to reveal what federal assistance (if any) he's received in the past, the Anchorage Daily Newsreported this week.
Miller, a Tea Party candidate who defeated Murkowski in the GOP primary in August, has said that the federal entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional and should therefore be run by the states.
But asked if Miller's family has benefited from any government-funded programs for low-income folks, his office clammed up.
"I don’t know why we have to answer just broadside questions on, 'Did Joe ever receive…?'" Miller spokesman Randy DeSoto told the Daily News by phone Wednesday. "I mean, do we have to tell?
"It seems to me that if a specific question comes up, or raised by specific facts, maybe we should have to answer."
Miller, who says his parents receive both Social Security and Medicare benefits, is calling on the privatization of both, for the sake of reining in spending in Washington.
Still, it hasn't prevented him from tapping government subsidies in the past.
In the 1990s, Miller received more than $7,000 in federal farm subsidies for land he owned in Kansas, the Alaska Dispatchreported last month.
More recently, the Anchorage Daily Newsdiscovered that Miller and his wife got a low-income discount on Alaska hunting and fishing licenses while Miller was earning $70,000 per year as an attorney.
Miller, a father of eight, told The Associated Press last month that the benefits his family has received in the past are "pretty darn irrelevant" to the current Senate race.
Whatever the arguments for contesting the government's ability to force Americans to buy insurance, groundless questions about President Obama's birthplace isn't one of them, a federal judge in Virginia ruled this week.
Judge Henry Hudson on Wednesday denied petitioner Eve Ellingwood's motion to intervene in Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's lawsuit against the health reform law. Ellingwood's motion argues that the "illegally obtained alleged" healthcare law is "illegal and void" because Obama wasn't born in the United States.
Her main exhibit: A tabloid Globe story from August 2010 revealing "shocking proof" that Obama was born in Kenya.
"The most important reason for my request for Intervention is the fact that Barack Obama is an illegal president," Ellingwood argues in her motion. "Therefore, any and all actions which have been made, and/or are proposed to be made by him, are null and void."
Ellingwood is a retired administrative law judge for the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. She was also a quixotic 2008 candidate for Congress who was beaten in the Republican primary for Nevada's 1st congressional district.
In her rambling motion, Ellingwood explains that she "loves all people - Black, jewish, asian, white, native and any and all others" and that "this litigation is being prosecuted to correct extreme wrongs caused by bad people from any of those people."
She goes on to argue Obama has been giving "his staff's cronies in Wall Street" billions of dollars "by lying and calling it stimulus money" and that her "life has been threatened not to tell this story."
Cuccinelli filed his lawsuit on March 23, the day Obama signed healthcare reform into law. Hudson has decided to allow the lawsuit to go forward.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said this week that he supports federal cuts in education, the arts — and even defense — but stopped short of extending that budget-balancing strategy to federal health research programs.
Appearing Tuesday night on CNN's "Parker Spitzer," Armey, now chairman of of the conservative group FreedomWorks, defended government spending on both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — as long as scientists at those institutions aren't interfered with politically.
"I would leave [the CDC] in the hands of the scientists and I would tell the politicians to butt out," Armey said when asked if he would cut the program. "Let real [scientists] who have real expertise make scientific decisions, medical decisions. Let's not have a bunch of political mandates issued by people who don't even understand."
Asked about cutting the NIH, Armey had a similar response.
"[The NIH] is probably an acceptable opportunity to do some good with the federal government's taxpayer dollars — if they have the discipline to leave the agency to do its job on a professional basis, rather than corrupting it," he said.
Other federal programs wouldn't fare as well in Armey's world.
Higher education, for instance, "should be under the jurisdiction and under the auspices of the state governments," he said.
"The state of Texas has a great university system that has not been made any better by federal government involvement."
Armey also endorsed the elimination of "a lot of nonsense like the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts."
"And how about getting rid of AmeriCorps, which is just obnoxious?" he said. "Even intellectually, it's an insult to the American people."
Medicare and Medicaid — which together represent the single greatest threat to the nation's fiscal health — weren't mentioned.
The anti-abortion group Americans United for Life announced Tuesday that it is spending $600,000 to target 12 Democrats in battleground districts in the closing weeks before the mid-term elections.
AUL Action, AUL's legislative action arm, has launched a "Life Counts" campaign combining online grassroots organizing, a radio ad campaign and email blasts to 12 districts. The campaign targets Democrats who voted for the health reform bill, which AUL believes allows taxpayer-funded abortions because it provides subsidies for the purchase of health plans that offer the procedure even if the subsidies can't be used to buy the abortion coverage itself.
"Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to taxpayer-funded abortion," AUL Action President and CEO Charmaine Yoest said in a statement Tuesday. "Candidates who supported the largest expansion of federal funding of abortion ever are going to find out that in this election, Life Counts."
Ads began airing in six Democratic-held districts on Monday. The targets: Reps. Paul Kanjorski (Pa.), Alan Grayson (Fla.), Kathy Dahlkemper (Pa.), John Salazar (Col.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.). The ads also target Arkansas state Sen. Joyce Elliott, who is running to take over the seat being vacated by Rep. Vic Snyder.
AUL Action started airing ads in six other districts last month. The targets: Reps. Baron Hill (Ind.), Chris Carney (Pa.), John Boccieri (Ohio), Tom Perriello (Va.), John Spratt (S.C.) and Bob Etheridge (N.C.).
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne takes the chattering classes to task in his column Monday for disseminating the "patently false" conventional wisdom that Democrats are running away from healthcare reform ahead of the mid-terms.
Dionne argues that "more and more of them are proudly campaigning on what the plan has achieved - and they should." He writes that the shift has been noticeable since new provisions went into effect Sept. 23: guaranteed coverage for children with pre-existing conditions, new rules allowing children up to age 26 to stay on their parents' plans, the ban on rescissions.
At least three Democratic incumbent are now running ads touting their support for the law.
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) has a TV ad that flips Republican talking points on their head and warns challenger Ron Johnson: "hands off my healthcare!" The message: Johnson's call for repealing the law would "put insurance companies back in control."
Reps. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and Dina Titus (D-Nev.) are also touting the law, and in Louisiana state Rep. Cedric Richmond is attacking Republican Rep. Joseph Cao for voting against the law.
"If Democrats say nothing about what the actual health-care law does," Dionne writes, "the [Republican] parody is all that will stick in voters' minds."
