With the end of the ILGA’s legislative session comes another year that has passed in which lawmakers failed to fix our health-care crisis.
Much of the resistance to implement common-sense health-care reform is the result of political games played between the three men at the top — Gov. Rod Blagojevich, House Speaker House Michael Madigan and Senate President Emil Jones.
There were chances to make good on the health-care promises of the party platform these leaders all claim to represent.
Instead the governor, who touts himself as a champion of health care, refused to work with the legislature to move his own initiatives. One bill, with language written by the governor, requires insurance companies to report how much of our money is spent on our care versus their profit. The bill passed in the House, with the vote of the speaker but was blocked in the senate.
The reason? The governor maintains he can require the insurance industry to report this data through executive power, without the consent of the legislature. Even though the measure likely had the votes to pass in the Senate, a body whose rank-and-file members are poised and ready to do the right thing on health care, he determined that would diminish his own executive power by acknowledging that the legislature has a role to play.
If his role in killing the bill genuinely came from his belief that he had the power to collect the data on his own, why has he not done so?
In the coming months, there will be efforts by rank-and-file lawmakers to pass health-care reform and anything less than full support from the leaders at the top is a disservice to the people of Illinois.
Emily Miller, Illinois Public Interest Research Group, Chicago
