COVID-19 & Healthcare

District 11 House Race

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district11houseTea-Publican Legislative District 11 Representatives Mark Finchem and Vince Leach are joined by Democratic newcomer Corin Hammond in the race for the two State House seats.

Finchem and Leach are part of campaign consultant Constantin Querard’s (Grassroots Partners) stable of religious right candidates. Querard also established the conservative Arizona Family Project, a conservative anti-choice organization. Querard only represents candidates who are acceptable to the Center for Arizona Policy, where he served as its Executive Director and CAP-PAC, as well as Director of Development for Arizona Right to Life.

The Arizona Daily Star candidate summary reveals:

Mark Finchem said the Bible is the source of law[.]

“I come from a Biblical world view. I don’t come from a secular world view,” he said. If someone comes from a different religious background? “It can launch a discussion,” Finchem said.

“I think a lot of people, whether they’re believers or not, subscribe to the idea that I am my brother’s keeper, and that doesn’t mean they’re kept by the government,” he said.

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LD 2 House Race: Gabaldón and Hernandez v. Ackerley

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Tea-Publicans in “blue” Pima County have a simple strategy for picking off House seats in Democratic voter registration districts: single-shot voting. If all Tea-Publicans vote for only their candidate out of GOP tribalism, and Democratic voters fail to do the same with their candidates — as they frequently do — it is statistically possible for a Tea-Publican to steal a seat.

ld2-houseThis is what happened in 2014 when John Christopher “Chris” Ackerley, in his second run for office, managed to defeat Demion Clinco, who had been appointed to the House seat earlier in the year to fill a vacancy. There were a number of reasons for Clinco’s loss, but better name ID and favorable reporting in the Green Valley News and Sahuarita Sun certainly were factors.

Ackerley is a math and physics teacher who runs on education issues. He is frequently cast by the media as a “moderate” because he is sane and occasionally departs from his party’s ideological leadership, e.g., referring to Governor Ducey’s and the GOP leadership’s budget for K-12 education funding and Prop. 123  as the “robbing Peter to pay Paul plan”; he was a sponsor of the bill to restore JTED funding slashed by the previous Tea-Publican legislature; he voted to restore KidsCare funding over the GOP leadership’s objection; and he voted against SB 1516, the GOP’s “dark money on steroids” bill, which was enacted into law.

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LD 2 Senate Race: Dalessandro v. Kais

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dalessandro-kaisThe Legislative District 2 Senate seat is currently held by Democrat Andrea Dalessandro, who previously served in the Arizona House.

(Dalessandro is the one in glasses).

Her Tea-Publican opponent, Shelley Kais, is a business woman who served as a campaign volunteer for Martha McSally during her 2012 run for Congress. Kais challenged McSally for the GOP nomination in 2014, finishing in a distant third place with less than eight percent of the vote, behind McSally and Chuck Wooten. You may recall that the local Tea Party raised a stink about McSally and Kais pulling out of a scheduled debate with Chuck Wooten in 2014.

Kais is now running for the LD 2 Senate seat as a Clean Elections candidate against Senator Dalessandro, also a Clean Elections candidate. LD 2 is a Democratic voter registration district.

Kais is backed by the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which lists her in its “16 in ’16: Races to Watch,” Comprised of the RSLC’s Future Majority Project (FMP) and Right Women, Right Now (RWRN) candidates running for state-level office.

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GOP plan takes away health care from 25 million Americans who now have it thanks to ObamaCare

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The 2016 Republican Party Platform (.pdf) at page 31 declares:


Restoring Patient Control and Preserving Quality in Health Care

ObamacareAny honest agenda for improving healthcare must start with repeal of the dishonestly named Affordable Care Act of 2010: Obamacare.

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We agree with the four dissenting justices of the Supreme Court: “In our view, the entire act before us is invalid in its entirety.” It must be removed and replaced . . .”

Well,  Tea-Publicans have been saying “repeal and replace” for six years now and have yet to produce any actual “replacement” plan that is anything more than reverting to the failed system that everyone hated before the Affordable Care Act. Their only true objective is repeal, period.

Donald Trump’s healthcare “plan” (it’s a list of platitudes) retains some of the most popular provisions of ObamaCare, but nevertheless proposes to replace ObamaCare with the worn out GOP standards of health savings accounts and interstate sales of health insurance policies (a race to the bottom in coverage, and it creates a legal morass for consumers with “choice of venue” provisions where to sue your insurer when denied coverage).

The Rand Corp. and the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund published an analysis of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s health agenda on Friday, along with a second analysis examining the proposals from her Republican rival, Donald Trump.

The big takeaway: 25 million people could lose health insurance under Donald Trump’s plan, analysis shows:

Trump’s proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health-care law, would result in as many as 25 million Americans giving up coverage, depending on how the repeal is implemented.

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marijuana leaf

Ducey Uses ‘Reefer Madness’ Scare Tactics to Fight Marijuana Legalization (video)

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marijuana leafGovernor Doug Ducey and a representative from a big-pharma-funded PAC snuck into midtown Tucson this week to give business people a one-sided argument on why they should band together to stop Prop 205, the marijuana legalization initiative that will be on the Nov. 8 ballot in Arizona.

Today’s Arizona Daily Star attributes so many misconceptions about marijuana to Ducey and Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk (of Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy) that I’m not sure where to begin. I’ll take them one by one– after the jump.

First, let’s look at the scientific and public health reasons for legalization and for easier access to marijuana for the general adult population. New research on the medical uses of marijuana are being released every day. 

Medical Marijuana Reduces Medicare Prescriptions and Costs

A July 2016 study published in Health Affairs showed an overall drop in prescription drug use among Medicare patients in states where medical marijuana is legal. The 17 states that have medical marijuana also saved $165.2 million in Medicare costs because patients switched to pot.  The research group concluded that if medical marijuana were legal nationwide, the US could see a $468 million decrease in Medicare prescription costs.

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