Out on the far southwest side a bruising political slugfest has broken out between old colleagues. Never close friends, congressmen Marty Russo and Bill Lipinski were nonetheless frequent companions over the past decade on flights back and forth from Washington. They are often seen–inaccurately–by outsiders as political peas in a pod, “conservative ethnic Democrats” who consistently vote against civil, reproductive, and women’s rights, but who support most narrowly defined prolabor and urban initiatives. Now the redrawn boundaries of the new Third Congressional District have pitted the two incumbents against each other in the March 17 primary.
Lipinski claims to bring home the political bacon for Chicago in the form of public- works projects. Russo positions himself as the champion of an increasingly beleaguered middle class, especially with his health-care proposal. Lipinski, who virtually cedes Russo’s claim that he’s a national leader, derides him for being a national politician and not a true representative of the old neighborhood and its people.
When another constituent attacked welfare, Russo bit the bullet. “Do you think people love being on welfare?” he said angrily, to which there was a mumbled chorus of “yes” from the audience. “You ought to see the way people live on welfare. Most people stay on welfare less than nine months. But to get people off welfare there have to be jobs for them.”
Those with some kind of insurance have also suffered as employers try to shift growing costs onto workers by reducing coverage or increasing employee payments. Four-fifths of all strikes in recent years have occurred to protect health insurance. Insurance companies have increasingly tried to avoid covering people who are sick or seem at risk of injury or illness, including AIDS. Millions of Americans are trapped in jobs they might otherwise leave because they have preexisting health conditions that would exclude them from insurance at a new job. Unemployment looms as a double catastrophe: loss of income, but also loss–possibly forever–of health insurance. More than one-fourth of Americans who are nominally protected are underinsured and vulnerable to catastrophes. Poor people covered by medicaid are shunted into a second-rate system; medicare for the elderly covers a declining share of old people’s health expenses, especially for long-term illnesses.
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Russo’s plan would provide insurance for everyone, including those now uninsured, and improved insurance for many already covered. Yet all that would be done at a lower total cost than the nation now spends for inferior health care. The U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that if a Canadian-style health plan were applied to the United States, “the savings in administrative costs alone would be more than enough [about $67 billion a year out of about $800 billion currently spent] to finance insurance coverage for the millions of Americans who are currently uninsured. There would be enough left over to permit a reduction, or possibly even the elimination, of co-payments and deductibles.”
Over the decade from 1981 to 1991, according to Common Cause, Russo received $228,575 from medical-industry political-action committees. Lipinski charges that those contributions led Russo to support lucrative industry tax breaks engineered by Dan Rostenkowski. Lipinski also implies–without offering any evidence–that Russo is not pushing forward on his health-care bill. Russo responds that he had nothing to do with the so-called transition rules that benefited insurers, and that he has worked hard on his bill, which now has 67 cosponsors, far more than any other health-care proposal.
