California???s Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, the winner of Tuesday???s special congressional election in California???s 10th District, was sworn in just after noon today by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The 64-year-old Democrat won the special election against Republican David Harmer with 53% of the vote.
Garamendi replaces Democrat Ellen Tauscher, who was picked by President Obama to be the State Department???s undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs.
In a statement released after Garamendi???s victory, Pelosi said, ???John Garamendi has had a long and distinguished career in public service, most recently as lieutenant governor of California, where he has been a powerful advocate for families and hardworking Californians, improving higher education, health care and the environment.???
Pelosi???s office said there is no set swearing-in date for Bill Owens, the winner of the wild special House election in New York???s 23rd District.
Government-Run Health Care?
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Republished with permission from factcheck.org.
Update, May 1: CPR has posted a response on its Web site, which the group has also sent to us, claiming that parts of this article are "blatantly erroneous" and adding, "Accordingly, we request that you remove this article from the 'Fact Check' site and issue any retractions to other media outlets as necessary."
We think that's nonsense. We don't remove or retract any of our criticism of this group's very misleading ad.
CPR argues that its ad does not claim that Congress or Obama were trying to adopt any specific country's health care system, but merely "points out the pitfalls of government-run health care." We invite readers to look at the ad and judge the credibility of that for themselves. We said this ad suggests and implies that Congress is moving toward adopting a Canadian- or British-style system of government-run health care, and we think that judgment puts matters mildly.
CPR then goes on to argue that Congress and Obama really do favor a single-payer system after all. But those claims fall short as well. CPR says "several" members of Congress support single-payer health care and mentions one bill that it says attracted 76 House cosponsors. That's still a minority of Democrats, and this same bill died quietly in committee in the last Congress. The current bill hasn't moved from committee since late January when it was introduced. Sen. Max Baucus, who is spearheading the health care effort, has said that "single-payer is not going to get even to first base in Congress."
CPR further states that Obama "has previously voiced support for a government single payer plan." That was true six years ago, but once again is not the whole story. Obama said at a 2003 AFL-CIO forum that he was "a proponent of a single-payer health care program," adding, "that's what I'd like to see. And as all of you know, we may not get there immediately." His stated position has changed over the years, however. He said in a 2007 magazine interview that he'd favor single-payer only if "starting from scratch" and that managing a transition from the current system to a single-payer system "would be difficult to pull off." And the fact remains, as we said in our article, the proposal he campaigned on was not a single-payer plan, and the administration recently said a government-run system is "wrong."
Correction, May 6: We originally wrote that PNHP had said Obama's message to single-payer advocates was to "drop dead." But the phrase was used in an article by Russell Mokhiber of the Corporate Crime Reporter newsletter; PHNP had posted his article on its site. We have changed the attribution above.
Sources
U.S. White House. "Health Care." WhiteHouse.gov, accessed 29 April 2009.
Budoff Brown, Carrie. "Groups strategize for single-payer plan." Politico.com, 28 April 2009, accessed 29 April 2009.
Corporate Crime Reporter. "Obama to Single Payer Advocates: Drop Dead." Corporate Crime Reporter newsletter, 3 March 2009.
Goldstein, Jacob. "Invited to Summit, Single-Payer Group Cancels Protest." WSJ Health Blog, Wall Street Journal, 5 March 2009, accessed 29 April 2009.
U.S. House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies. Hearing on National Institutes of Health: Budget, Implementation of Recovery Act, and National Children's Study." CQ Transcriptions, 26 March 2009.
"Research on the Comparative Effectiveness of Medical Treatments." Congressional Budget Office, Dec. 2007.
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Pub. L. 111-5, 17 Feb. 2009.
U.S. National Institutes of Health. Estimates of Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories. NIH.gov, 15 Jan. 2009, accessed 29 April 2009.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Press release. HHS Names Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. HHS.gov, 19 March 2009, accessed 29 April 2009.
Dr. Brian Day Web site, accessed 29 April 2009.
Brian, Day. E-mail sent to FactCheck.org, 28 April 2009.
Sikora, Karol. E-mail sent to FactCheck.org, 30 April 2009.
Nolte, Ellen and C. Martin McKee. "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis." Health Affairs. 8 Jan. 2008.
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