3 years ago, Obama talked health care in Iowa City

IOWA CITY - President Barack Obama plans to visit Iowa City on Thursday to talk about the health care bill he's expected to sign into law Tuesday.

Obama used Iowa City as the site to unveil his health plan as a presidential candidate in May 2007.

Below is a copy of The Gazette's story of that event, as well as another one from what was, as far as I can tell, Obama's first trip to Iowa City.

05/30/2007

Obama unveils health plan

By James Q. Lynch

The Gazette

IOWA CITY - An Eastern Iowa family paying nearly $1,000 a month for health insurance and staring at the very real possibility of bankruptcy shouldn't be the face of health care in America, presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday.

"This is not who we are," the Illinois Democrat said in Iowa City on Tuesday after sharing the story of Amy and Lane Chicos and their three children.

Seventeen years after losing a lung, a leg bone and part of a hip to testicular cancer, Lane Chicos is cancer-free, but the couple, who own oneota.net, an Internet service provider in Decorah, face a mountain of medical and insurance expenses that have pushed them to the brink of bankruptcy, Obama said.

"We are not a country that rewards hard work and perseverance with bankruptcies and foreclosures," Obama said at the University of Iowa Medical & Education Research Facility.

This shouldn't be a country where "skyrocketing profits of the drug and insurance industries are paid for by the skyrocketing premiums that come from the pockets of the American people," he added.

Aides estimated Obama's five-point plan would cost as much as $65 billion a year with the cost divvied up between businesses, consumers and the government, and much of it raised by repealing tax cuts to the wealthy.

At the same time, Obama said, it would reduce health care costs by an average of $2,500 per family. That sounded good to many of those invited to be a part of the rollout of the candidate's health policy.

If Obama's plan helped a little, it would mean a lot to her family and many others, Amy Chicos, 39, said.

"There are lots of factors that play into our success or failure, but in our case, the high cost of health insurance premiums is really dragging our family down," said Chicos, who was introduced by Obama.

Pauline Taylor, an operating room nurse at University Hospitals in Iowa City, agreed the time is right.

"There is a national awareness and there is more support" than in the 1990s when President Clinton and then-first lady Hillary Clinton pushed universal coverage, said Taylor, a nurse for 33 years and a member of Iowa for Health Care. The challenge will be the logistics of moving from the current system to universal coverage, Taylor said.

Obama rivals agree, claiming his plan is not truly universal health care. For example, his plan doesn't have the mandate that rival Democratic candidate John Edwards is proposing to ensure all Americans get coverage.

"Incremental measures are not enough," Edward's spokesman Mark Kornblau said. "Any plan that does not cover all Americans is simply inadequate."

Obama acknowledged the challenge, but said the nation can overcome the challenges. Referring to the efforts of previous leaders, including Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, he said it's time for the nation to push the boundaries again.

Plan highlights

• Reduce the cost for business and workers by the federal government picking up the cost for some of the most expensive illnesses and conditions.
• Focus on prevention to avoid costly and debilitating conditions.
• Reduce costs by improving the quality of health care. Rather than reward medical care providers based on the quantity of service, reward them based on the quality of outcomes.
• Reduce waste and inefficiency by moving to paperless information technology.
• Break the stranglehold of a few drug and insurance companies by forcing competition in the marketplace.

11/06/2006

Obama joins Culver in I.C.; Nussle heads to Dubuque

By James Q. Lynch

The Gazette

On a day tailor-made for fall fieldwork, Iowa's major party candidates for governor spent Sunday harvesting votes in Democratic strongholds.

With rising Democratic star Sen. Barack Obama joining him, Democrat Chet Culver rallied with thousands of supporters in Iowa City, hoping to boost his yield of votes in what is expected to be a lopsided margin of victory there.

You, Johnson County, you will be the difference in this election, Gov. Tom Vilsack told the crowd before Obama and Culver spoke. We don't want a small margin. We want a huge margin.

Earlier in the day, Republican Jim Nussle made a visit to his campaign's phone center in Dubuque, hoping to harvest the conservative Democrats there who have backed him in his congressional elections. In 2000 and 2004, for example, Nussle defeated his Democratic challengers in Dubuque County even though Al Gore and John Kerry carried the county in their presidential bids.

While Culver, the secretary of state from West Des Moines, and Democrats were in a celebratory mood as they rallied in Iowa City,  lieutenant governor candidate Patty Judge said the Democratic team is ahead by 9 percentage points - Nussle and his volunteers vowed to work until the last minute to bring home a victory similar to President Bush's win in Iowa two years ago.

"The Democrats are dancing on the 10-yard line," Nussle told the volunteers. "We're going to go all the way to the goal line."

Iowa Republicans had made more than 125,000 contacts with potential voters as of Saturday night - about 40,000 phone calls and doors knocked on ahead of what the campaign had projected.

Another encouraging sign, the Manchester attorney said, was the fact there are more GOP volunteers on the streets this weekend than in 2004, when the party's final 72-hour get-out-the-vote effort was credited with giving Bush a 10,000-vote victory in Iowa.

Nussle said there's an effort by Democrats and political pundits to call the election before the polls open Tuesday.

"They're trying to talk down the race, but we have seen this happen before where we have closed strong as a result of our volunteer organization," he said.

He said the campaign has been helped by President Bush's visit to Le Mars on Friday, as well as 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's remarks that were seen as disparaging of military personnel in Iraq.

In Iowa City last night, Obama told the sometimes raucous crowd that he was excited by what he's seeing in Iowa.

The feeling that it's time for change mirrors what he's been seeing in travels around the country, the 45-year-old first-term senator from Illinois said.

"The easiest thing in the world is to feel cynical," said Obama, who has said he'll consider a 2008 presidential bid. "It's easy to assume the world as it is is the way it has to be."

As he did when he burst upon the scene at the Democratic National Convention two years ago, Obama urged Democrats to exercise the "audacity of hope," which also is the title of his recently published memoir.

"It requires audacity to believe in things not seen," he said, adding that "to hope is not to ignore the challenges we face, but to say we can do something about it."

From the birth of the nation to the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage, unionization and the influx of immigrants, he said, "this country was built on the audacity of hope." 

Tuesday's election will reaffirm that Americans, "at their core, are decent people," Obama said. "When American people pay attention, good things happen," he said, and they are paying attention in this election cycle.