Tom Waring, the Wire
Former congressman Joe Sestak, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, praised the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear pact signed by the United States, Iran, the European Union and five other nations.
“Today’s nuclear agreement with Iran is another cautious, crucial step toward peacefully and permanently stopping the Iranians from attaining nuclear weapons. Diplomacy is protracted, difficult and complex — but it must always be the first option to try over war,” Sestak said.
Sestak, who is hoping to challenge Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, said the U.S. military might have difficulty halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“Because of a sophisticated air defense system, an array of offensive missile, naval and air forces, and the fact that a number of Iran’s nuclear facilities are deeply buried underground — one protected by hundreds of feet of stone — any U.S. airstrikes would be wide in breadth and long in duration to accomplish,” he said.
Sestak said successful U.S. strikes would result in stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but for only four years. In contrast, last week’s agreement could potentially be much longer lasting — 15 years or more — if the deal is truly verifiable.
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Meanwhile, Sestak last week continued his statewide book tour in Reading, where he and supporters walked from Reading Hospital to a local restaurant to talk about the health security chapter from his book, Walking in Your Shoes to Restore the American Dream.
The chapter, “A Health Security Strategy,” highlights what Sestak believes is the progress made by the Affordable Care Act and includes some of the specific policies that the candidate would fight for in the Senate.
“In the military, we give everybody health care not because we are liberals, but because it pays great dividends to our nation,” Sestak said. “SEAL Team 6 isn’t ready to go when one of their members has an abscessed tooth that has been left untreated or not prevented. And just as we need a productive warrior force to carry out our national defense mission, our national workforce must be equally able to carry out our economic mission.”
Sestak argues that the ACA has taken steps toward fair access to quality care and lower costs through private market mechanisms. He pointed to a 44-state analysis that found that the number of new marketplace insurers was five times greater than insurers exiting the market, creating more choice for individual consumers and new opportunities for issuers with lower, competitive pricing.
“Before reform, double-digit annual increases in premiums were the norm,” Sestak said. “Now, the national average premium increase for 2015 is estimated to have fallen to 7.5 percent. And because premiums on the exchange are estimated to be 15 percent lower in 2016 than originally expected in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the health care expansion will result in government savings of an extra $100 billion over the next decade.”
Sestak contended that the ACA has also added 13 years to the life of the Medicare trust fund, which will now be solvent through 2030 instead of 2017 pre-ACA.
Similarly, the ACA is fining hospitals with excessive readmission rates, incentivizing hospitals to focus on post-discharge health. Hospital errors have dropped 17 percent since 2010, saving 50,000 lives and $12 billion to the health care system, according to Sestak.
The uninsured rate has fallen from 20 percent to 11.4 percent.
“Six in 10 people who bought their own health insurance through exchanges set up through the ACA were previously uninsured,” Sestak said. “Reducing the number of uninsured Americans is crucial because the cost to our economy of underinsurance and the uninsured was estimated by the Institute of Medicine to be between $65 billion and $130 billion annually.”
Sestak supports allowing individuals — as long as the safety standards are the same as in the U.S. — to import cheaper drugs from Canada, where American pharmaceutical firms sell the same drugs for lower prices.
Maine has permitted citizens to reimport U.S.-made drugs from Canada for almost a decade. A month’s prescription of Cymbalta costs $113 there instead of $149, and Nasonex is discounted from $105 to $29.
“Pharmaceutical companies can argue they need to charge more to pursue critical research, but I cannot accept that argument when the same drug companies spend $27 billion a year on marketing drugs — that’s enough to buy 6,750 Super Bowl ads,” Sestak said.
Sestak also supports allowing Medicare to bargain directly with pharmaceuticals for best prices, as Medicaid and the Department of Veterans Affairs already do.
