Roskam sure knows about 'missing an opportunity' to save lives

My congressman Peter Roskam (IL-6) had this to say at a health care subcommittee hearing last week:

“In the Medicare program, many of these cutting-edge ideas have failed to be used to their full potential. In turn, our seniors are not able to benefit from greater efficiency, access and increased positive outcomes in receiving health care. Even worse, while some Americans already have access to these groundbreaking models, they are at risk of losing their pathway to receiving this care once they turn the age of 65. In fact, it is not out-of-line to say that we are missing an opportunity to save lives with these advanced treatment methods.

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What utter nonsense. Roskam spent the last ten years trying to prevent, repeal, defund, degrade the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed over the opposition of Roskam and his fellow Republicans, from saving tens of thousands of lives, and giving tens of millions a shot at better health without going bankrupt paying for privately financed health care. But Roskam's romance with private health care, which is still largely unavailable to tens of millions, is such that he continues to bash Medicare, besides the ACA, another lifesaving area of the American health care system.

Roskam has no credibility trash talking Medicare, much less the Affordable Health Care Act, as he's done for the past decade. As I told him to his face last year at a Glen Ellyn Civic Center meeting with several constituents, "If you had been successful in preventing passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the tens of thousands saved by it...would be dead.