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UUP’s Upstate Medical University Chapter provided its members with an opportunity to size up three candidates running for the 25th Congressional District seat during a candidates’ forum Sept. 16.
More than three dozen UUP members and retirees attended the 75-minute public forum, which featured discussion and debate between Democrat Dan Maffei, Republican Dale Sweetland and Green Populist Party candidate Howie Hawkins. Former Upstate Chapter president Ray Colton moderated the UUP-sponsored event, held at Upstate’s Weiskotten Hall.
Maffei, Sweetland and Hawkins are running to replace U.S. Rep. James Walsh (R-Onondaga), who is retiring after 20 years in Congress.
“It went very well,” Upstate’s Brian Tappen, a UUP delegate, said of the forum. “The candidates discussed issues relating to higher education, health care and women’s rights. Health care was what they primarily talked about.”
On health care, Maffei likened his vision of a health care system to a “public-private partnership,” where the government would provide coverage similar to Medicare for those without health insurance, according to a published report in the Syracuse Post-Standard.
Sweetland expressed doubt that a public health program for coverage for everyone could work. He said such a system would be rife with waste and fraud. Hawkins said he supported a single-payer national program for public health coverage that would be funded via payroll taxes and increasing income taxes on the rich, the paper cited.
If elected, Hawkins vowed to embrace HR 676, also known as the United States National Health Insurance Act. If approved, the bill would replace America’s private health insurance system with a single-payer national health program.
Single-payer health care is a system where payments for doctors, hospitals and other health providers come from a single fund. Medicare is a single-payer system, as are public health care systems in Canada, Britain and Australia.
“Only the politicians and the insurance companies that finance them are standing in the way,” Hawkins said.
Sweetland said he backed the bill’s intent, but didn’t believe it could work. He said he would not support the bill. “I have not seen government put anything in place and manage it really well,” he said.
Maffei said he supports a government-run health system for all Americans, but was uncertain if HR 676 was the right health care plan and questioned using taxes to fund the proposal.
“I’m interested in pushing the envelope in the direction so that … everybody would have access to health care and people would have an option, if necessary, that’s similar to Medicare,” he said. “But I think that has to be from the bottom up.”
Delegates to the union’s 2008
Spring Delegate Assembly in Albany backed a resolution calling on the American Federation of Teachers to join hundreds of other unions, federations and labor councils in endorsing the federal single-payer system legislation.
— Michael Lisi