Sep

27

Greetings from the Libertyville Township Democrats!

September 27, 2008 | Comments Off

The Libertyville Township Democrats is a group of Democratic residents that has been meeting and working together for over a decade. We have worked with our local, statewide and national Democratic candidates spreading their messages to our residents. We have tried to inform our voters that there is a choice at election time. Many years ago, the voters in Libertyville Township and Lake County had very little choice at election time. We have come a long way and now nearly every electable position has a Democratic candidate. We even have contested primaries in many races. This is a great accomplishment in only a few years. Read more

Jul

1

Dem Booth at Mundelein Community Days!

July 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment

July 4, 2009
9:00 amto5:00 pm
July 5, 2009
9:00 amto5:00 pm

Local Democratic organizations will have a booth at Mundelein Days, July 4 and 5. EDDI needs volunteers for a few shifts on both days, starting at 9 a.m.

Mundelein Community Days Booth
Saturday-Sunday, July 4-5
9:00am to 5:00pm
Santa Maria del Popolo Church
Rte 45 & Courtland St
Mundelein

Even if you can only spend an hour or two, it should be a lot of fun — or just drop by and say hello!

To volunteer: 847-550-8631 or illinoiseddi@hotmail.com

Jul

1

Mundelein Community Days Parade

July 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment

July 5, 2009
1:00 pmto3:00 pm

Prospect Ave & McKinley Ave (near the east end of Hawley), Mundelein, IL
Join your fellow Democrats & candidates! We will have banners and, possibly, a float. Statewide candidate Julie Hamos will be joining us as well as some of your new 2010 candidates.

Please RSVP: illinoiseddi@hotmail.com or 847-550-8631

Jun

26

Libertyville Days Parade Pics!

June 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

We had a great day marching in the Libertyville Days Parade!

Jun

26

Township Precinct Map

June 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Thanks to the Lake County GIS for this map…

LIBERTYVILLE TOWNSHIP PRECINCT MAP

Jun

25

75% of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming

June 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Limits on Emissions Have Wide Support
By Steven Mufson and Jennifer Agiesta, Washington Post Staff Writers, Thursday, June 25, 2009

Three-quarters of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with substantial majority support from Democrats, Republicans and independents.
Read more

Jun

23

How did they draw these boundary lines?

June 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Chances are you have made these statements more than once, “How did they ever draw these boundary lines?” “Why do my children go to a different school than the family only a block away?” These are common questions for new residents and long time residents as well.

The answer to both questions is that a good number of local district boundaries were drawn over a hundred years ago. At that time our communities were small with few businesses and sources of revenue. The schools particularly took advantage of a large taxable landowner, the railroads. The railroads crisscrossed Illinois long before the highways and towns sprung up. The local leaders drew the school district boundaries so they all got a share of the railroad property included within their respective districts. This was a constant source of revenue for a rural district or small town.

Later our communities grew but the boundaries remained. Today this is a cause of confusion for realtors, homeowners and the districts themselves. Very few school districts boundaries have changed despite the growth of neighborhoods that are bisected by two and even 3 grade school districts.

Township boundaries are equally confusing as the school districts. Libertyville Township includes most of Libertyville, portions of Mundelein, Vernon Hills, Green Oaks, Mettawa, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff, North Chicago and Waukegan. These township lines were also drawn over 100 years ago. At that time, there were few towns so township government was the only governing body in many areas. We often forget about township government until we receive our annual tax bills.

We also have our municipal boundaries, library, county board, state and national congressional and senate boundaries. Some of these remain constant and others may change every 10 years after the national census.

Check your voter’s registration card to determine your districts or go to the Lake County Democrats website http://www.lakedems.org/. On the left, click on “Area Maps” and type in your address. The various districts maps will be displayed so you can check yours.

 

Jun

22

Wide support for government health plan: poll

June 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Sun Jun 21, 2009 1:45am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans strongly support fundamental changes to the healthcare system and a move to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published on Saturday.

The poll came amid mounting opposition to plans by the Obama administration and its allies in the Democratic-controlled Congress to push through the most sweeping restructuring of the U.S. healthcare system since the end of World War Two.

Republicans and some centrist Democrats oppose increasing the government’s role in healthcare — it already runs the Medicare and Medicaid systems for the elderly and indigent — fearing it would require vast public funds and reduce the quality of care.

But the Times/CBS poll found 85 percent of respondents wanted major healthcare reforms and most would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance. An estimated 46 million Americans currently have no coverage.

Seventy-two percent of those questioned said they backed a government-administered insurance plan similar to Medicare for those under 65 that would compete for customers with the private sector. Twenty percent said they were opposed.

President Barack Obama and many Democrats in Congress have argued a publicly run healthcare insurance plan would increase competition and drive down the high cost of care at a time when the U.S. economy is mired in a deep recession.

Republicans argue a public plan would drive insurers out of business and lead to a government-run healthcare system.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives suggested this week that all Americans should be able to get insurance regardless of medical history and that coverage should be mandatory for individuals and businesses.

The proposal, contained in the latest House draft of the healthcare bill, would create new insurance exchanges where people shop around for health coverage. Whether a government-run plan has a role in such an exchange has spurred serious political debate.

Republicans, the minority party in Congress, have proposed more modest healthcare changes, but lack the votes in the House or Senate to push them through or derail the Democrats’ health reform drive. They have warned about the expected high cost of restructuring the healthcare system, projected at more than $1.5 trillion — a huge expense for a nation carrying record budget deficits.

The Republicans also hope to gain traction by playing on fears a vast expansion of government could further hurt the economy and reduce the quality of medical care.

The poll found that people were uneasy about heightened government involvement in the healthcare sector, with 77 percent saying they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care.

A total of 895 adults participated in the telephone survey, which was conducted from June 12 to 16 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

(Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Jun

22

Health insurance for the 21st Century

June 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Upgrading To National Health Insurance (Medicare 2.0)
The Case For Eliminating Private Health Insurance

by Leonard Rodberg & Don McCanne
CommonDreams.org July 13, 2007

Private health insurance was an idea that worked during part of the last century; it will not succeed through the 21st Century. With jobs increasingly service-based and short-term, the large employment-based risk pools that made this insurance system possible no longer exist. Medical care has become more effective and more essential to the ordinary person, but also more costly and capital-intensive. The multiple private insurance carriers that emerged during the last century can no longer provide a sound basis for financing our modern health care system.

Alone among the nations of the world, the U.S. has relied upon private insurance to cover the majority of its population. In the mid-20th Century, when medical care accounted for barely 1% of our gross national product, medical technology was limited, and jobs lasted for a lifetime, health care could be financed through such employment-based, premium-financed health insurance. But the time for private insurance has passed.

Health care has now become a major part of our national expenditures. The premium for an individual now averages more than $4,000 per year, while a good family policy averages more than $10,000 per year, comparable to the minimum wage and nearly one-fourth of the median family income. As a consequence, though the US spends far more on health care than any other nation, we leave millions of our people without any coverage at all. And those who do have coverage increasingly find that their plans are inadequate, exposing them to financial hardship and even bankruptcy when illness strikes.

If we believe that everyone should have health care coverage, and that financial barriers should not prevent us from accessing health care when we need it, then it has become clear that the private health insurance system cannot meet our needs. Health care has simply become too expensive to be financed through private insurance premiums.

Supporters of insurance companies claim that they create efficiency through competition. However, the truth is that insurance industry is increasingly concentrated, with three national firms, United Health, Wellpoint, and Aetna, dominating the industry. And the high and rising cost of health care shows that whatever competition there was in the past has not worked to hold down costs.

Supporters of private insurance also claim that it expands consumer choice. However, the choice of plans that these companies offer is not what consumers want; it is the choice of their physician and hospital, exactly the choice that private insurance plans, in the guise of managed care, increasingly deny us.

What has been the response of the health insurance industry to this situation? To protect their markets and try to make premiums affordable, they have reduced the protection afforded by insurance by shifting more of the cost to patients, especially through high-deductible plans. They have also targeted their marketing more narrowly to the healthy portion of the population, so as to avoid covering individuals with known needs for health care. Yet premiums continue to rise each year, increasing by nearly 70% above inflation in just the last six years.

The so-called “universal health care” proposals being put forward by mainstream politicians would simply expand the current system without addressing any of its problems. They would simply mandate that either our employers provide us with coverage or we, as individuals, purchase our own coverage in the private insurance market. These plans cannot work in the face of the high cost of premium-based coverage for even the average person. (Some proposals would offer the option of buying a competing public plan, under the theory that the public program would be more efficient and effective. The flaw here is that the public plan would attract those who are unable to afford private coverage or who are paying high premiums or have no insurance because of pre-existing conditions. Placing these high-cost individuals in a separate government pool would make it unaffordable for most other people. This “death spiral” would cause the public plan to fail.)

The main impetus for renewed interest in health care reform has been the rapid rise in costs over the last few years. Yet, while most of these proposals give lip service to the need to control costs, none actually addresses the problem in a serious way. (The introduction of health information technology and “disease management”, which some of them urge, are mere placebos; they may make politicians feel better, but studies have shown they will do little to reduce costs and may actually increase them.)

Everyone acknowledges that coverage for low-income individuals must be subsidized. But what about the average-income individual and family? If they must now be subsidized as well, we might as well throw in the towel and recognize that a more efficient, more equitable financing system has to be adopted if it has any chance of providing coverage while being affordable to the society. An individual mandate to purchase private insurance cannot provide good coverage while remaining affordable, while employer-provided coverage also can no longer be sustained as the premium costs to the employer become increasingly unaffordable.

The private insurance industry spends about 20 percent of its revenue on administration, marketing, and profits. Further, this industry imposes on physicians and hospitals an administrative burden in billing and insurance-related functions that consumes another 12 percent of insurance premiums. Thus, about one-third of private insurance premiums are absorbed in administrative services that could be drastically reduced if we were to finance health care through a single non-profit or public fund. Indeed, studies have shown that replacing the multiplicity of public and private payers with a single national health insurance program would eliminate $350 billion in wasteful expenditures, enough to pay for the care that the uninsured and the underinsured are not currently receiving.

Such a single payer plan would make possible a set of mechanisms, including public budgeting and investment planning, that would allow us to address the real sources of cost increases and allow us to rationalize our health care investments. The drivers of high cost such as administrative waste, deterioration of our primary care infrastructure, excessive prices, and use of non-beneficial or detrimental high-tech services and products could all be addressed within such a rationalized system.

In sum, we will not be able to control health care costs until we reform our method of financing health care. We simply have to give up the fantasy that the private insurance industry can provide us with comprehensive coverage when this requires premiums that average-income individuals cannot afford. Instead, the U.S. already has a successful program that covers more than forty million people, gives free choice of doctors and hospitals, and has only three percent administrative expense. It is Medicare, and an expanded and improved Medicare for All (Medicare 2.0) program would cover everyone comprehensively within our current expenditures and eliminate the need for private insurance. This is the direction we must go.

Leonard Rodberg is Research Director of the New York Metro Chapter, and Don McCanne, Senior Policy Fellow, of Physicians for a National Health Program. www.pnhp.org

Jun

17

Supporting Single-Payer Health Care

June 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment

A PETITION TO CONGRESS - Supporting Single-Payer Health Care

CLICK ME TO SIGN THE PETITION

Whereas:

* 46 million Americans are currently without health insurance;
* 60 million Americans, both insured and uninsured, have inadequate access to primary care due to a shortage of physicians and other health service providers in their community;
* 100 million Americans have no insurance to cover dental needs;
* 116 million adults, nearly two-thirds of all non-seniors, struggled to pay medical bills, went without needed care because of cost, were uninsured for a time, or were underinsured in the last year;
* The United States spends $2.3 trillion each year on health care, 16 percent of its Gross Domestic Product;
* Americans spend $7,129 per person on health care, 50 percent more than other industrialized countries, including those with universal care;
* The U.S. does not get what it pays for. We rank among the lowest in the health outcome rankings of developed countries, and on several major indices rank below some third-world nations;
* The number of health insurance industry bureaucrats has grown at 25 times the growth of physicians in the past 30 years;
* In 2006, the six largest insurance companies made $11 billion in profits even after paying for direct health care costs, administrative costs and marketing costs.

And, whereas:

* Medicare has administrative costs far lower than any private health insurance plan;
* The potential savings on health insurance paperwork, more than $350 billion per year, is enough to provide comprehensive coverage to every uninsured American;
* Only a single-payer Medicare-for-all plan can realize these enormous savings and provide comprehensive and affordable health care to every citizen.

Now, therefore:

* We, the undersigned, urge the United States Congress to pass a single-payer Medicare-for-all program which will provide quality, comprehensive health care for all Americans.