Title: Roemer to launch independent bid for President (50 state ballot access - American Elect & Reform parties) Source:
Hot Air URL Source:http://hotair.com/archives/2012/02/ ... independent-bid-for-president/ Published:Feb 23, 2012 Author:Ed Morrissey Post Date:2012-02-23 12:29:01 by Hondo68 Ping List:*The Two Parties ARE the Same*Subscribe to *The Two Parties ARE the Same* Keywords:the American Elect party, the Reform Party, former governor & congressman Views:12213 Comments:41
We soon won’t have Buddy Roemer to kick around in the GOP any longer — if we ever did. Today, Roemer will announce his withdrawal as a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, and instead campaign for the American Elect party. If you haven’t heard of the American Elect Party, well …
Frustrated and largely ignored, Buddy Roemer is ending his bid for the Republican nomination and will instead seek the presidency on a third-party ticket.
The former Louisiana governor will make his plans official Thursday at a news conference in Santa Monica, within hours of another Republican debate that he’s been excluded from.
It’s that fact that is driving his decision. The party and the major television networks have “turned their backs on the democratic process” by excluding him, even though he’s a former governor and congressman, he said in a statement.
Roemer has been waging a campaign based in part on ending the influence of special interests in American politics. He capped donations to his campaign at just $100, and raised about $340,000 from individual donors.
He says he will now run for the nomination of Americans Elect, an independent group seeking ballot access in all 50 states that plans to hold an Internet primary to choose a bipartisan ticket.
Roemer will also seek the nomination of the Reform Party, the legacy of H. Ross Perot’s largely self-funded independent runs for President in 1992 and 1996. It hit its high-water mark in Minnesota’s 1998 gubernatorial election when Jesse Ventura narrowly won a three-way race. Unfortunately for the Reform Party, Ventura was singularly uninterested in both reform and governing. His single term ended in embarrassment as Republicans and Democrats crafted budgets without him after Ventura spent a season while Governor as an announcer for the XFL football league. In 2000, the party nominated Pat Buchanan as its presidential nominee, who had no impact on the race at all. By 2004, the Reform Party ended up endorsing Ralph Nader on the Green ticket, and in 2008 nominated that household name Ted Weill to lead their ticket. Thanks to a dispute over control of the party, Weill only appeared on the ballot in his home state of Mississippi … and got only 470 votes.
That is the unfortunate track record of the most significant third party in modern American electoral history.
Independent bids usually have almost no impact on presidential elections, unless the candidate has the money and the inclination to spend millions of his own money or can find substantial funding elsewhere. Perot is an example of the former in the 1992 election; he changed the outcome of the race, but never won a single electoral vote for himself. Nader is an example of the latter, but even that might not have been true in 2000 had it not been for an extraordinarily close race in Florida. He only took 2.7% of the national popular vote, as opposed to Perot’s 19% in 1992.
Roemer’s GOP bid has always been a puzzlement. Roemer has never won office as a Republican; he switched parties during his term as Governor in Louisiana and ended up third in the open primary when he ran for re-election. Until this election, Roemer hasn’t been an organizing or philosophical voice in the GOP, either. He’s a charming candidate to be sure and has much to contribute on ideas for reform if he’s serious, but the move to court the American Elect and Reform Parties strongly suggest that he’s less serious about those efforts and more interested in making himself the point. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to like Roemer and cheer him on a bit, even if you can’t quite take him seriously.
I actually take Roemer pretty seriously for a few reasons:
1.) America's Elect is a serious organization, with some powerful bi-partisan support. They will be on the ballot in all 50 states.
2.) Every poll shows that the bulk of Americans are sick and tired of both parties.
3.) Roemer is a credible candidate and fiscal conservative -- he was both a Congressmen and Governor. He's a down to earth guy that people can relate to.
Some of his positions:
Economy
- Reduce the size of federal government to about 18 to 18.5 percent of GDP – currently it is at about 25.5 percent.
- Income taxes would be simplified to a flat tax, with an individual exemption of $50,000. A flat tax of 17 percent would be paid on all income beyond that. This means that individuals making $50,000 or less would pay no income tax, while those making more than $100,000 would have an effective tax rate of 8.5 percent.
- Elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, the Earned Income Credit and most deductions would be key to this plan, to simplify and standardize complicated tax laws.
- Reduce the corporate tax from 35% to 15% and eliminate special interest loopholes.
- Modify social security and Medicare by slowly raising the eligibility age by one month each year for 24 years.
- Cease all energy subsidies, including oil and ethanol, to level the playing field for energy innovation
Healthcare
- Buddy Roemer’s healthcare reform would eliminate Obamacare, but keep insurance coverage of preexisting conditions.
- Any healthcare reform package has to include tort reform, which Buddy achieved as governor of Louisiana to successfully lower healthcare costs.
- Individuals must be allowed to buy insurance policies across state lines, eliminating pocket monopolies and increasing competition among providers. -
- Pharmaceutical companies must be exposed to competition to lower prices.
Education
- School choice is central to ensuring the continuous improvement of educational institutions around the country.
- Buddy Roemer’s healthcare reform would eliminate Obamacare, but keep insurance coverage of preexisting conditions.
It sounds all nice and stuff.
But someone gets a disease that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat. They had no health care coverage. So now they can go buy a policy for a thousand bucks a month or whatever to cover those costs. That sounds like a forumla to bankrupt the insurance providers.
I think pre existing things should be covered. Buy how?
They had no health care coverage. So now they can go buy a policy for a thousand bucks a month or whatever to cover those costs. That sounds like a forumla to bankrupt the insurance providers.
That's definitely an issue.
Maybe the policy should be that you can switch between insurance companies (for example when you switch between jobs) and have your preexisting condition covered. But you can't go from having no insurance, get a condition, and then sign up to have it covered.
They had no health care coverage. So now they can go buy a policy for a thousand bucks a month or whatever to cover those costs. That sounds like a forumla to bankrupt the insurance providers.
That's definitely an issue.
And still countries with universal health insurance manage to spend less on health care than the US, and have longer life expectancy.
American insurance companies have done an amazing job convincing people that spending more to get less is a good thing.
WOW! I'm impressed, wikipedia...NOT! Cherry picking the parts you like best does not give you the whole picture, try looking a little deeper, but you probably did and didn't like what you saw.
Myth 6: Life expectancy is longer in other countries because they have universal tax-funded medical coverage, and the U.S. does not.
The longest-lived people are probably the Japanese. They have good genes, are seldom overweight, and eat lots of fish. They have had a government-funded medical system since 1927—and they also have a robust private medical sector.
Japanese, like all people except Canadians and North Koreans, are not restricted to a “single” (government) payer. How do we know they wouldn’t live even longer without their government medicine?
International comparisons are tricky because of ethnic diversity in the U.S. While Japanese men in Japan live longer (mean 78.4 years) than the “average” American man (74.8 years), Asian-American men live still longer (80.9 years). (Bureau of the Census, cited by John Goodman)
If we look at illnesses in which aggressive, timely medical care makes a difference, Americans live longer. For example, American women have a 63% chance of living five years or more with cancer, compared with only 56% for Europeans. For men, the figures are 66% for Americans, and 47% for Europeans, writes Betsy McCaughey.
Some European countries with universal coverage have better life expectancies than the U.S. They also have less gang warfare, less racial diversity, fewer traffic deaths, and a different diet. Americans who don’t die from homicide or car crashes outlive people in every Western country (David Gratzer, IBD 7/26/07).
Problems like gangland wars, drug abuse, and unhealthy lifestyles are not caused by lack of universal tax-funded health coverage, and would not be eliminated by enacting it. The suggestion that U.S. life expectancy would increase with universal coverage is faith-based or hope-based, not evidence- based or logic-based. In fact, such an increase is neither sought nor expected by advocates of radical reform such as Tom Daschle, who urge Americans to accept the infirmities of old age and the inevitability of death.
Universal access to a ticket in a waiting line is not a way to improve life expectancy; quite the contrary.
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If there is a lesson which U.S. policymakers can take from national health care systems around the world, it is not to follow the road to government-run national health care, but to increase consumer incentives and control.
•Universal health insurance does not necessarily mean universal access to health care. In practice, many countries promise universal coverage but ration care or have extremely long waiting lists for treatment. Those countries that have single-payer systems or systems heavily weighted toward government control are the most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on the choice of physician, and other barriers to care.
•Those countries with national health care systems that work better, such as France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, are successful to the degree that they incorporate market mechanisms such as competition, cost-consciousness, market prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control.
In France, for example, co-payments run between 10 and 40 percent, and physicians can balance bill over and above government reimbursement rates, something not allowed in the U.S. Medicare program. On average, French patients pay roughly as much out of pocket as do Americans. The Swiss government pays a smaller percentage of health care spending than does the U.S.
As Richard Saltman and Josep Figueras of the World Health Organization put it, The presumption of public primacy is being reassessed. Thus, even as the U.S. debates adopting a government-run system, countries with those systems are debating how to make their systems look more like the U.S.
But they have not solved the universal and seemingly irresistible problem of rising health care costs. In many cases, attempts to control costs through governmental fiat have led to problems with access to care, either delays in receiving care or outright rationing.
In wrestling with this dilemma, many countries are loosening government controls and injecting market mechanisms, particularly cost-sharing by patients, market pricing of goods and services, and increased competition among insurers and providers. As Pat Cox, former president of the European Parliament, put it in a report to the European Commission, we should start to explore the power of the market as a way of achieving much better value for money.
Some European countries with universal coverage have better life expectancies than the U.S. They also have less gang warfare, less racial diversity, fewer traffic deaths, and a different diet. Americans who don’t die from homicide or car crashes outlive people in every Western country.
Exactly right.
Take blacks out of the equation and U.S. life expectancy rates isn't that different than the typical European country.
Americans are also by far the most obese people in the developed world. The only country that rivals the U.S. in obesity is Mexico.
