Bob Kelleher in The Missoulian
On Health Care:
Single-payer, government-funded health system
Kelleher said Baucus is too beholden to health insurance companies--and the money they donate to political campaigns--to oversee any meaningful change to America’s broken health care system.
“Private insurance companies have been, are and will be under the Baucus plan soaking up 25 percent of the public’s money,” he said. “Only 75 percent of each insurance dollar goes to a doctor or a hospital.”
Kelleher, who supports a single-payer, government-funded health system as in Canada, also faulted Baucus for not having a more detailed plan to fix health care. “If he hasn’t figured it out in 30 years, what
Baucus is saying is that there will be no health program as long as I’m chair of the Senate Finance Committee,” Kelleher said. “Unless it’s controlled by private insurance companies.”
Source: By Jennifer McKee, The Missoulian
Jul 3, 2008
On Jobs:
Women earn 67 cents for every dollar men earn
Unemployment on some of Montana’s Native American reservations is above 70 percent, Kelleher said. Additionally, a disproportionate percentage of Montana’s children are in or near poverty.
Montana women earn 67 cents for every dollar a Montana man makes for the same work, a problem Kelleher has identified as one of his top priorities.
Source: By Jennifer McKee, The Missoulian
Jul 3, 2008
On Principles & Values:
Admits past failings to prevent Baucus from attacking
Saying he’s concerned Democratic Sen. Max Baucus may use personal smears in the campaign, as he has in past campaigns, Republican candidate Bob Kelleher laid out his life’s faults Wednesday. Kelleher said he’d beat Baucus to the punch and lay bare his
personal shortcomings:- As a 23-year-old man, Kelleher was a friar in a Carmelite monastery 18 months away from ordination into the priesthood. He dropped out, Kelleher said, because he couldn’t handle the vow of chastity.
- He has been married
& divorced three times. He has seven children and regrets the impact his absence had on their lives. Kelleher said he particularly regrets the way he walked out on his first wife,
Gerry, mother to his six oldest children and to whom he was long married.
- “I wanted to have fun,” he said, but his fun hurt his children and his wife, whom he described as “wonderful.”
Source: By Jennifer McKee, The Missoulian
Jul 3, 2008
On Tax Reform:
Opposes $1.6 trillion dollar tax cut for billionaires
Kelleher said, “As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Baucus is one of the most powerful men in Washington, D.C. What has he done with that power to help the poor people of his own state?”“He passed a
$1.6 trillion dollar tax cut for the rich, for billionaires,” Kelleher said, referring to tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 pushed by President Bush and supported by Baucus. “Montana only has one billionaire, Denny Washington. The rest of us out here are poor.”
Source: By Jennifer McKee, The Missoulian
Jul 3, 2008
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