Dean, David vie for 4th District U.S. House seat
The battle for Pennsylvania’s newly formed 4th Congressional District pits Democratic State Rep. Madeleine Dean against Republican businessman and entrepreneur Dan David.
Dean earned her law degree from Widener University and practiced law locally before becoming an English professor and serving as an Abington Township commissioner.
David attended Northern Michigan University and the executive education program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-founder of Skippack -based equities research firm Geo-Investing and was instrumental in uncovering fraud by China-based
firms on the U.S. stock exchange.
While both candidates agree on several key issues — the need for further healthcare reform; common sense gun laws; and action plans to tackle the opioid epidemic — they have differing visions of how to achieve these goals.
Although most polling shows the district — which now encompasses most of Montgomery County (except for Lansdale, Hatfield and Souderton/Telford) and an eastern sliver of Berks County (Boyertown, Bally and Bechtelsville boroughs, and Colebrookdale, Douglass and Washington townships) — leaning heavily Democratic, the district, which was recently redrawn in response to gerrymandering, could prove crucial to the overall balance of power in the House, which is now led by Republicans.
In separate interviews conducted recently for Digital First Media, David and Dean each laid out their case to be elected Nov. 6.
Health care
David: People are paying about $8,000 a year before they pay their premiums. That’s the flaw in the Affordable Care Act. It was the humane way look at the problem. It wasn’t the business way to look at the problem because health care falls into four different buckets; costs, quality of care; outcomes; and accessibility, and what the Affordable Care Act did is it gave everybody accessibility without dealing with costs. And when you write a blank check companies are going to put in whatever number they want.
Who complained when the affordable care act passed? Drug companies? No. Hospitals? No. Health insurers? No.
All those for profit companies in the healthcare industry were like ‘Ok, we’ll take the ACA, and now they have record profits.
It made no sense. You’ve got to deal with the costs first and there are defined cost savings. You have reimportation of drugs. We make the drugs here because we have the most robust patent laws and protections and we sell them for half the price to Canada or to China. We’re subsidizing the world’s health care.
Defensive medicine costs anywhere between $500 and $700 billion dollars because doctors are incentivized to prescribe everything — they’re paid that way— and get all these test prescribed and they’re afraid that if they don’t prescribe every test under the sun they’re going to get sued out of practice.
There are other ways of doing this, like negotiating drug prices as well. Our Medicare and Medicaid pay a company called Express Scripts to negotiate drug prices. Express Scripts is a publicly traded company worth 100 billion. I think we could do it for 100 billion
We spend twice as much per capita than any other country on health care and have the worst outcomes outside of cancer, so when you bring down the costs, we can understand exactly what a single payer system costs vs a free market system and you can make a rational decision. But until we bring down the cost and deal with that, we don’t really know what’s right.
David added that while many point toward the healthcare system in other countries as a potential model, part of the problem is that the U.S. defense budget far exceeds that of those countries, in part, because America is also defending them.
Dean: To me health care is a right and all people, all Pennsylvanians, of course, should have access to affordable quality healthcare.
I’m a state legislator, so if you remember back when the Affordable Care Act was passed, governors had the opportunity or option to opt into Medicaid expansion or not.
Governor did not. I was new legislator at the time and we urged him to please expand access through Medicaid expansion which Gov. Wolf did. That got another 1 million Pennsylvanians access not just to physical health care but also mental health care and addiction treatment. So I believe we should go farther than that and make sure every person has coverage.
Right now in Pennsylvania we are at a low in terms of the uninsured rate. We’re at about 7.5 percent — about 900,000 people (uninsured) — We need to get healthcare to everyone.
When I knock on doors it’s the number one issue in terms of what people are concerned about.
They’re concerned about their premiums being too high, their prescription drug costs being to high and for
some folks there’s a gap in coverage. I know and believe we should do better and we should make the Affordable Care Act a stronger, better, universal piece of legislation so that all people can have health care.
Guns
Dean: This has been one of my top issues, even before I became and elected person, I took my kids to the Million Mom March back in 2000. I have cared about gun violence in this country my whole adult life. In Pennsylvania I formed with other members, the PA safe Caucus after the slaughter at Sandy Hook and I was a freshmen member at that time and I was actually told by leadership that freshman don’t start caucuses. But I didn’t take that to heart.
So what do I want? I want legislation that saves lives. And I believe this needs to be done, must be done at the federal level.
But as a state legislator, watching the feds do nothing, I argued in the Pennsylvania House that we must take the lead in order to protect the citizens of Pennsylvania, so, I’ve introduced legislation session after session, including universal background checks, including just this session, a ban on bump stocks; lost and stolen (firearms regulation) ; and many other pieces of legislation.
But In Pennsylvania they haven’t gone very far they rarely come out of the committee that I sit on which is judiciary.
I want to be clear. My proposal, my wish, is literally to save lives. It has nothing with violating anybody’s Second Amendment rights.
We had unprecedented small progress in the Pennsylvania House this year. Just three weeks ago, we, in the House, passed legislation that the Senate passed it too and then sent to the governor for signing that would require mandatory relinquishment of weapons from a person subject to a final order of protection from abuse PFA.
Right now under the law, it’s not mandatory with all judges, It’s discretionary, It could take up to 60 days and you’re currently allowed to hand off to third party that could be your mom, your sister, your brother. We know the deadly results of those kind of problems. So this bill requires immediate relinquishment of a gun to a secure third party.
That’s actually going to save lives, so I’m very proud of Pennsylvania for having done that. And that’s only one small step. I ordered the bump stock ban after Los Vegas and I had no idea what a bump stock was before Las Vegas when 58 people were mowed down and 500 more were injured. We actually passed that out of the judiciary committed but it has not come up for a vote on the floor of the house. I’ll take all these things to the federal level and I believe we are going to be joined by a lot more people who believe we must do something to stop the slaughter
David: The problem is that with someone like my opponent, we can say, we agree on something like bump stocks, that banning something that takes a semi automatic weapon and makes it essentially automatic makes sense. Then, they come up with a bill that bans 15 other things. We just agreed on one thing, why don’t we just pass that bill and be done with it.
If we’re all agreeing that there’s got to better communication between mental health and law enforcement, let’s pass that bill. If we’re all agreeing that high capacity magazines are something that we can compromise on, let’s do that. But let’s not pack 50 things in a bill and say ‘Well, I tried,’ because you know what, you didn’t try. You tried to flip a fast one by everybody.
Opioid epidemic
Dean: This is a grave problem. Last year’s numbers were a staggering increase. Last year 72,000 people died in this country of opioid overdoses and it’s all over our community.
What I’ve been fighting for at the state level and I’ll fight for at the federal level, is that we shine a bright light on this. We think utterly outside the box and we must treat the disease of addiction. This is not treating some criminal behavior. This is not treating shameful behavior. This is the disease of addiction and the way to do it , again is to prioritize the resources.
To make sure that insurers cover treatment for recovery. To make sure there are beds available, that we make sure the stay is appropriate and the expertise is there. There is hope. There is recovery. But we are losing a generation of people and addiction doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor white or black, young or old. It just doesn’t care. It’s a deadly, deadly addiction so we have to bring all the resources to bear.
When I was in (Washington) DC a year ago, I was invited to the white house along with other legislators and I asked this administration, ‘What are you doing about this public health crisis. And at that point, Mick Mulvaney said he really didn’t know how to drive resources toward it. Shortly after that,the president declared it an emergency in our country but didn’t put substantive resources toward it. This is a multi-layered problem that’s going to require tremendous resources but it’s absolutely the right thing to do.
David: There’s no one magic bullet. Like with gun violence. If you’re talking about source. We know most of our opioids come from our southern border that’s not in dispute. So we do need to secure our border. I think we get involved into this hyperbole of a wall, which is ridiculous because Clinton built a wall, Bush built a wall, Obama built a wall there’s 1,200 miles of wall before President Trump pretended like he invented the word.
Largely where there isn’t a wall there’s the desert — the Sonoran desert — and its a 50 mile trek. Thousands of immigrants die a year trying to cross that desert and who’s bringing them? They don’t book through Travelocity. This is the cartel. How are they paying for it? They’re muling. Of course, this makes no sense to me. I’m not for separating children. Of course that was a bad idea, but that in an of itself is Congressional inaction and that’s why I’m running for Congress, because Congress has ceded all its power to the executive branch for the last 25 years.
Immigration
Dean: The way I frame it is to remind people that immigration is our strength, diversity is our strength. We actually need more immigration. Experts tell us that we need more sound immigration to bring the diversity in skills, talent, and entrepreneurial spirit — people who are hardworking and also people who are seeking refuge. So what I hope to be a part of is a sensible, comprehensive immigration reform that preserves our notion of how we value our differences and how we value folks from other countries and of other religions.
This administration, a year ago, tried to close down the DACA program — which allows those brought to the United States by undocumented immigrants a deferred action from deportation. That’s been caught up in the courts. Thankfully the administration has been unsuccessful in shutting down DACA
Seven hundred thousand young people should not fear deportation from this country that they have known as their country, where they work and they pay taxes. So I hope the court will shut down the Trump administration in its attempt to deport young people that were brought here through no fault of their own and are fully engaged in supporting our community.
I hope we come up with an immigration policy that makes sense. The notion of pouring billions of dollars into a border wall makes no sense. I took the time to go the border and look at the wall and talk to agents who are stationed there. I took the time to go to the Bucks County detention Center. What I have not had the chance to see is the horrific locations of detention centers where children are torn from their parents. That is not my America. That is UnAmerican, inhumane, immoral and it should not be the policy of our government.
I have voted to protect cities that choose to be sanctuary cities. II think it makes a less safe community when we mandate that local law enforcement — that’s really there to provide safety — should be handed the job of enforcing immigration.
David: This takes Congressional action to solve. My opponent has come back to the center now that the primaries are over and is now saying we need humane border security.
Where we differ is sanctuary cities. She’s an enthusiastic supporter of Philadelphia’s sanctuary city status.
The hypocrisy in saying we’re for a secure border, but if you get past our border, go to one of our cities and we’ll protect you. How does that make any sense?
People who employ migrant workers want a very clear guest worker program. We should have one. We need Congress to come up with one. I’m not anti immigration by any stretch.
Our birth rates are now going down so we’re going to create more jobs over the next 10 years than we are going to have people going into the workforce with baby boomers going out of the workforce. And we’re going to need to fill that gap with immigrants. We’re a country of immigrants, so it’s super important that we have a really thoughtful policy that isn’t based in one stance. It isn’t just a lottery system. It isn’t just any kind of one size fits all. We should have a merit based system like Canada has as well as a lottery system so that people of all walks get an opportunity, and then we still have asylum and refugee seekers that we take care of.
Taxes
Both Dean and David said they would not have voted for the 2018 omnibus spending and tax bill passed by Congress earlier this year, citing their disagreement with the lowering of the personal tax rate. David, however, agreed with the lowering of the corporate tax rate and added that promoting Dean, whom he said voted ‘yes’ on every tax increase as a state representative, is a bad idea. Another reason David said he would not have voted for the tax bill was because he wasn’t going to read 2,200 pages in one day. That sort of thing, he said, has to stop.
Final pitch
David: I’m fiscally conservative and socially moderate. It’s about this district and this vote. Do we want to push our country further to the left or do we want to bring it back to the center. That’s the binary decision to make.
Dean: I hope what voters will see is somebody who’s genuinely interested in the work. I hope that voters will take a look at my body of work… I hope they’ll see that my diverse background and my commitment to problem solving with truthfulness and respect for others is what I bring to the table. I hope they’ll also see the hard work I did in the Legislature, so I’m prepared to go to Congress and fight for the issues I’ve been fighting for. I’ve already shown that I’m committed to speaking out, and speaking out for decency and ethical good government that wants to solve people’s problems for the common good, not special interests.