Cruz, O’Rourke stump here
GOP senator, Democratic contender bring messages to Houstonians.
After a week of traveling Texas, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz finally got what he was looking for during an hourlong town hall meeting in Houston: A reprieve from protesters concerned mainly about health care cuts.
The Republican from Houston hosted his town hall about veterans issues with hardly any interruptions from critics who overtook similar events in Austin and, to a lesser extent, Dallas earlier this week.
Just 11 miles away from Cruz’s town hall, U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso Democrat, was making the case to his supporters why they need to help him defeat Cruz in 2018. More than 200 people jammed the Gorgeous Gael, a pub near Rice University, to hear O’Rourke promise to take on Cruz next year.
Only about 40 protesters lined the streets out front of the Sheraton Brook Hollow Hotel to lob complaints via bullhorns and picket signs about Cruz’s positions on the health care reform and veterans issues. In Austin, more than 200 greeted Cruz when he arrived at a similar town hall meeting.
That relative calm came even as U.S. Senate leaders
on Saturday were warming up to giving Cruz a chance to present a major amendment to their health care reform plan, according to the Washington Post. Until now, GOP leaders have passed on the Cruz amendment, worried it could make the bill even harder to win support from more moderate Senators.
“I am encouraged by the directions that the conversations are going,” Cruz told the Chronicle on Saturday. “We’ve been working for many months trying to find common ground.” ‘Gigantic bureaucracy’
His amendment would let insurance companies offer plans that do not include some benefits mandated by Obamacare, as long as they offer other plans that do. Under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, insurers were required to provide what were deemed as essential benefits like maternity care, mental health coverage and trips to the emergency room.
Cruz said his plan would do something that any reform bill must accomplish: Lower premiums.
Cruz said his amendment would do that by offering more affordable insurance plans — even if they cover less.
While a few critics in Houston did infiltrate the hotel ballroom where Cruz addressed about 100 people organized by a conservative leaning veterans group called Concerned Veterans for America, he mostly went unabated as he described his solutions to fixing the problems with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Cruz called the VA a “gigantic government bureaucracy” that is inefficient and unresponsive.
He used his time to tout reforms that would allow veterans to more easily choose doctors outside of the VA health care system. The VA has a limited program of allowing that now, but Cruz said it is loaded with structural flaws.
“Every veteran should have the right to choose your own doctor,” Cruz said. “If you want to go to the VA, you’ve earned that right, you bled for it. But on the other hand, if you want to go to the local doctor down the street, you should have that choice.”
Cruz said a more expanded choice program would force competition onto the VA — much like what happened to the United States Post Office when private carriers started competing more aggressively with them.
“I’m a passionate believer in competition,” Cruz said. “Competition improves quality.”
Cruz also used the event to tout his own recently introduced legislation to require the VA to hire a chief information technology officer to modernize the VA and to better catch things like bogus wait lists uncovered three years ago.
While Cruz didn’t mention Obamacare at all during his presentation, after the meeting he spent nearly 40 minutes in exchanges with supporters and his critics as he walked around the ballroom until he and his staff were the last few people in the room. ‘Jacked up premiums’
Houston resident Jan Forney was one of those who confronted Cruz afterward, telling him flatly she was worried about what the Senate health care plan and his amendment would mean to those with pre-existing conditions who now have coverage under Obamacare.
“What I’m seeing is very scary,” Forney said. “I’m alarmed.”
Cruz held Forney’s hand and told her that “Obamacare has jacked up premiums” and made health care unaffordable to too many working-class people. He said his amendment would offer people more affordable options to make sure they get coverage. He said people with pre-existing conditions would get more help to pay premiums under the plan the Senate is working to pass.
O’Rourke said it’s bad news if Cruz’s amendment gains steam.
“His amendment ends up driving millions of people out of health care or quality health care,” O’Rourke said.
He said people would have access to inferior health care plans that doesn’t cover everything they might actually need and “that is no solution at all.”
O’Rourke is planning his own town hall-like forum on Monday in San Antonio to talk about veterans who are discharged from the military but don’t get adequate care because they did not leave the service honorably. O’Rourke said a lot of times, the reasons they were discharged tie back to what they experienced in the service, yet they don’t get adequate care after they leave.