Senator Joe Lieberman has a long track record of fighting for* reform of the US healthcare systems. His recent focus has been on Community Health Centers. He believes that community health centers play a critical role in our public health infrastructure.
Senator Lieberman thanked local community leaders and Common Council President Michael Coffey-D and Council member Herbert Grant-D for accompanying on his tour of the Norwalk Community Health Center. “The consistently number one concern of the people of Connecticut,” he said, “is about healthcare and health insurance. Its from the hundreds of thousands in our state who don’t have it, but the million plus who do [have health insurance] are paying too much and more and more as employees or employers.”
“I’m here at this Community Health Center in Norwalk because I think community Health centers are a tremendous way to make healthcare available particularly obviously to the lower income people, who otherwise would not get the best healthcare.”
When I asked what Senator Lieberman viewed as the impediment towards creating more community health centers he responded: “Some of it what I heard over the years, the capital costs of actually building the centers. And there’s a real roll here for Federal funding, this just can’t happen automatically. Federal funding has to give some basic assistance in operations. Obviously you have a lot people coming in here who don’t have any coverage for healthcare. There needs to be a subsidy. There was a multi billion dollar increase in funding for these community health centers across Connecticut and America.”
Senator Lieberman’s web site reports that “In addition to working for these centers nationally, he announced that Connecticut would receive more than $3.4 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services to help operate community health centers.”
“Everyone,” Lieberman stressed, “regardless of income should have the same opportunity to the same healthy life.”
Questions still dogged the Senator by members of the press who asked for Lieberman’s reaction to the British and Netherlands announcing troop withdrawals while President Bush asks for troop increases. “Ideally you wish some of the troops could have gone into Baghdad to help secure the city. … But I do believe that Prime Minister Blair is going to increase the troop levels in Afghanistan which is also important and takes some pressure off of us.”
Lieberman went on to say in response to the non binding resolution that the Senate failed to pass:
“There are some things Congress can do. The Constitution is pretty clear about the power has over war [issues]. One we authorize wars and two, we fund them. But the President as Commander in Chief runs a war. In the next few weeks or few months you are going to see both of those tried. One, there may be an attempt, Senator Biden has indicated, Senator Levin has also, to put in a new resolution of authorization, differing from the one that passed in the fall of ‘02. to authorize the war in Iraq. That’ll be a very interesting debate. The second, which is what I said … I was opposed the non binding resolution because it was a lot of sound and fury that really didn’t do anything, it was non binding. If people in Congress my colleagues are opposed to this war then do what the Constitution gives us the power to do, cut off the funding. Some are ready to that, the majority is not.”
* update Originally a typo excluded the word for in this sentence.
