The Honorable  Charles Gonzalez

Dear Representative, it has been reported by Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC in the Huffington Post that health insurance companies are exempt from the Sherman anti-trust laws.

If this report is accurate and true why is this the case? You have stated you want fair and open competition but I fail to see how this can be accomplished if the insurance companies enjoy protection under the law from competing insurance companies.

I also understand from the report that Texas is one of the states that allows this to occur. Why aren’t you trying to have this law changed in order to lower the costs.

Are you so bent on a government option that you cannot support fair and open competition?

I think that Tort Reform and eliminating the exemption from the anti-trust laws would go along way to reforming health care and not cost us billions of dollars.

What is your position on this?

Thank you for your time

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HealthCare and the Capitol

On Oct 13^th there was a vote in the Senate Finance Committee for President Obama’s health care reform.  The Senate Finance Committee voted 14 to 9 to move the 5^th and final health care reform proposal through the conservative panel. 

In the past about 1912 Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to have a version of universal health care. He was out of office when he did this. Roosevelt’s progressive platform advocated health insurance for all Americans alongside other liberal ideals such as women’s suffrage, but none of his plans really got started.

 Between 1934 and 1950 during the Great Depression, illness was one of the largest and fastest-growing causes of poverty.  This is when Truman tried to pick up where Roosevelt left off, but with a difficult economic environment, anger over the Korean War, and paranoia about communism kept a bill from ever coming close to passage.

In 1974 it was Nixon’s turn to state, “Now, for the first time, we have not just the need but the will to get this job done. There is widespread support in the Congress and in the Nation for some form of comprehensive health insurance.”  But as we all know the Watergate scandal was raging and wrecked Nixon’s career so this one never got off the ground.

Then coming next, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994 that took office with a majority in the Senate and House and reforming health care in his campaign. But universal health care legislation never got voted on. 

Now we have Barack Obama in 2009 even stating, “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”  There are still many battles in the future of the Health Care Reform and the biggest is how to pay for the plan.  The least generous package will cost $900 Billion over 10 years and this does not include a national public health insurance option.

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