Grassley visit focuses on health care
Senator stops in Sibley for town hall meetingSIBLEY, Iowa — Sen. Chuck Grassley said Thursday he would continue to work for passage of a bipartisan health care reform bill, stating that while legislation pushed by Democratic leaders has some positives, “there are so many other bad things in those bills” that he wouldn’t support them.
By: Ryan McGaughey, Worthington Daily Globe
- Grassley
- Sibley meeting questioner
SIBLEY, Iowa — Sen. Chuck Grassley said Thursday he would continue to work for passage of a bipartisan health care reform bill, stating that while legislation pushed by Democratic leaders has some positives, “there are so many other bad things in those bills” that he wouldn’t support them.
Grassley spoke before a crowd of about 200 people at Merry Lanes at an event hosted by Sibley Kiwanis. The Republican senator has been on a 16-county tour of Iowa since Monday.
“We’ve been having big turnouts at town meeting, mostly over the health care issue,” Grassley said. “I believe that (negative reaction to) health care (reform) is the culmination of a lot of fear over some of the things Washington is doing.
“I just came from Spirit Lake, and I normally have 50 people at a town meeting. We had 850. Can you believe that?”
Grassley, a key member of the Senate Finance Committee negotiating team working on health-care legislation, spent most of his nearly 40-minute presentation taking questions from people in attendance. He began with a brief health-care status report, noting that there are three House of Representatives bills that must be merged into one as well as a bill out of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s committee, which now after Kennedy’s death is Sen. Chris Dodd’s committee.
“I’ve been involved in the last several years talking to a large number of Republicans and Democrats together in what would be a bipartisan bill, trying to do it in a way that’s a little more reasonable and maybe not as sweeping,” said Grassley, adding a bipartisan bill has yet to be written.
During a town hall event Wednesday in LeMars, according to a Sioux City Journal report, Grassley was asked by Woodbury County Republican Party Chairman Brian Rosener to stop taking part in negotiations with Democrats. The senator acknowledged Thursday that he’s been taking steady criticism from liberals as well as conservatives over health care, but that he would continue to work for some type of bipartisan agreement.
During the question-and-answer segment of the program, Grassley took several health care-related queries, including one on tort reform — or, as Grassley deemed it, medical malpractice reform.
“I favor a $200,000 cap on punitive damages,” Grassley said. “The idea isn’t just to cut down on lawsuits, because it doesn’t prohibit suing … but doctors won’t have to practice defensive medicine.”
In response to another health care question, Grassley described a scenario in which “if your employer doesn’t provide health insurance for you, and you’ve got more than 25 employees, you’d pay an 8 percent payroll tax.
“The language we use for that is pay for play, and I’m not for pay for play,” he added.
Grassley was asked for his reaction for an article written this week by The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus on Grassley’s role in health care negotiations that called into question his political motivations on the matter.
“If I left the Senate today, in less than a month people are going to forget about Chuck Grassley,” he said. “I don’t know why I bothered to tell her (Marcus) before she even interviewed me about 72 hours ago, ‘I’m not telling my town meetings anything I haven’t been saying over the last four or five months.’ If you did start saying things different, it will catch up with you.
“There are several things that are distorted ... and some of these she gets off these blogs,” Grassley added.
Grassley suggested the U.S. as a whole should use Iowa and the Upper Plains as a model for health care, stating that “if it were practiced in the rest of the country the way it is here, you’d cut Medicare costs by one-third.” Reimbursement for health care delivery should focus on quality, not quantity, and incentives could be given for quality, he said.
“Another way would be to concentrate on five diseases that eat up 75 percent of the dollars,” Grassley said.
Wade Ellerbroek of Sibley asked Grassley about what northwest Iowa Republicans could expect as far as the party’s chances for additional strength in Washington. Grassley said the independent voters who buoyed Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections have begun to abandon that party.
“We didn’t do so badly among Republican voters in 2006 or 2008, but we lost the independent vote,” Grassley said. “Of course the reason they left in 2006 was they thought on all this fiscal stuff, they thought we lost our way. … It looks like we can pick up significant numbers of seats in the House of Representatives (in 2010), but not enough to get a majority, and maybe one or two in the Senate. It will be very tough to pick up more in the Senate … until 2012.”
Grassley expressed disappointment that a request to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (and former Iowa governor) Tom Vilsack for federal purchase of $50 million in pork was declined. He also criticized the amount of money being spent on federal bailouts as well as President Obama’s stimulus package, and warned of the rapidly growing federal deficit.
“If we don’t get on this (deficit) within the next year or two … you’re going to cripple the national debt, and it’s going to be catastrophic,” he said.
From Sibley, Grassley went to speak at a town hall meeting in George, followed by a similar event in Spencer.
Tags: state and region, healthcare reform, charles grassley, news, healthcare
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