Tom Daschle - Thomas Andrew Daschle is a former U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader from South Dakota. He is a member of the Democratic Party. He was defeated on November 2, 2004, by the Republican candidate, John Thune, in his bid for re-election.
He is currently a Special Policy Advisor at the law firm Alston & Bird LLP, visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Bob Kerrey - Bob Kerrey is president of The New School in New York City.
For twelve years prior to becoming president of The New School, Bob Kerrey represented the State of Nebraska in the United States Senate. Before that, he served as Nebraska's governor for four years.
Bob Kerrey is the author of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir, published by Harcourt Books (May 2002). He served as a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, currently leads a five year writing challenge sponsored by The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, and is co-chair with Newt Gingrich of The National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care.
New School President Bob Kerrey engages in an informal discussion with Tom Daschle, former U.S. senator and congressman, leading healthcare reform advocate, and public policy expert.
They discuss the growing misinformation and confusion surrounding the healthcare debate, and discuss possible solutions to this increasingly complex problem.
Former Senator Daschle makes a pretty clear case in flushing out the health care progress from it's past incrementally and tortuously slow movement of small successes to the present administrations full court press, and more importantly why it needs to be. He does a good service by exposing the distortions, lies, and walls built to protect the status-quo to the determent of the majority of Americans.
1. Once someone has the flu, they are contagious to others, whether a doctor sees them or not.
2. We should all be so lucky that illegal immigrants show up at the ER with the flu. That would be inexpensive. The reality is that they show up in the ER with stab wounds from a fight- or motor vehicle crash injuries from drunk driving (and killing a 4 year-old girl despite already having 3 DUI convictions on his driving record) and/or not wearing seat belts. Last month, they just fled the scene after killing another driver in a hit-and-run crash, (they literally got out of their car and ran) and when the cops finally tracked down their address from their abandoned car's license plate, they had already taken a Greyhound bus back to Mexico.
But Daschle insists we should treat them for the flu. As if that would make any difference. It would be far cheaper to put Greyhound bus stops at every emergency room all the way to Mexico.