8th Congressional hopefuls spar over health care

Passage of national health care reform earlier this year has made the issue no less debatable than during the long months legislators fought and agonized over its details.

Even as Democratic 8th District Congresswoman Melissa Bean of Barrington continues to meet with constituents to explain what she sees as the positive nature of the reforms, her opponents - Republican Joe Walsh of McHenry and Green Party candidate Bill Scheurer of Lindenhurst - remain critics of the new law.

But even Walsh and Scheurer's attitudes toward health care reform are "as different as night and day," according to Scheurer.

Scheurer says that if he were in Bean's place, he too would have voted for the bill. It was important to affirm the commitment that 45 million more Americans should be able to get health care coverage, Scheurer said.

Despite being seriously flawed, the plan provided a platform to move forward on the issue and not risk losing a moment in history that was in danger of passing, Scheurer said.

Apart from that, he disagrees with just about every aspect of how the law purports to meet that goal.

Walsh, meanwhile, said Republicans like himself also want to see more people insured, but the plan's approach was so thoroughly flawed and centered on government control he never could have voted for it on any basis.

"There's not a Republican or Democrat who would tell you that expanding access is not a goal," Walsh said.

Walsh agrees with the Republican approach, which was to make smaller changes to the existing system, like offering the same tax breaks to individuals who buy their own insurance as employers receive, Walsh said. He also believes the reforms should have allowed consumers to shop across state lines for health insurance and expand the whole notion of consumer-driven health care.

Walsh said he believes the reforms will only reduce the percentage of uninsured Americans from 15 percent to 6 to 8 percent while lowering the quality and cost-effectiveness of care.

"This is a huge, expensive price to pay for that level of change," Walsh said.

Scheurer and Walsh both believe the law as passed will make health care more expensive for consumers and have a negative effect on private insurers and physicians' business finances.

Scheurer doesn't believe there were bad intentions on the part of anyone who supported the plan, but that the win-at-any-cost political mentality in Washington blinded many Democrats to the flaws.

"Politics makes good, smart people dumb," Scheurer said. "We never have a good, humble, honest debate about anything in this country."

Walsh supports a complete repeal and replacement of the health care plan, but said this would realistically require both a Republican majority in one of the legislative chambers as well as Republican control of the White House to prevent a presidential veto.

While Republicans won't get a shot at the presidency until 2012, a Republican majority on Capitol Hill in the meantime could at least start to fix the flaws in the law by defunding some of the problematic reforms, Walsh said.

Scheurer, as a third-party candidate, said Congress doesn't need a party majority to fix the problems but just a few rational voices - like the child in the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

But Bean strongly refutes the claims of her opponents as misinformation that's she's been kept busy trying to correct throughout the district.

Seniors, especially, she said have been relieved when she's explained the true effect of the law on their coverage and allayed their fears of devastating changes, she said.

And perhaps the most universal benefit of the reform, Bean added, is the security it provides against people's policies being retroactively dropped when some insurance companies look for things in patients' pasts they can arbitrarily claim as undisclosed pre-existing conditions.

She cited the example of a person who had to fight in court after coverage of a serious medical condition was denied because of having once worn braces.

"It's one of those things that makes people say, 'It ought to be illegal,'" Bean said. "Well now it is."

She said she couldn't even speak to her opponents' claims of private insurance companies and doctors going out of business as a result of the bill because she's seen no such evidence herself.

Bean acknowledged that some legislative work on health care reform is likely to continue, but nowhere near the complete overhaul of the new law that Scheurer and Walsh claim is necessary.

She believes that as more and more people see the effect of the law as one of improvement and patient protection, the fears that critics have been touting will fade into history.

The 8th District includes parts of Cook, Lake and McHenry counties.