BY CORINNE BOYER
SENATOR RON
WYDEN ON
HEALTH CARE,
RUSSIA AND
TRUMP
The Oregon congressman drops by
Eugene Weekly for a visit
B
efore holding his 54th town hall meeting of the
year, Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden sat down with
Eugene Weekly to answer questions about single-
payer health care, the status of the Russia inves-
tigation and the Trump administration. Last week,
Wyden joined Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Peter DeFazio in a
rally outside the federal courthouse in Eugene to oppose the
proposed Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, the Senate
version of TrumpCare.
Wyden told the crowd, “Two-thirds of the patients in
nursing homes have their care paid for by Medicaid. This
bill has a double age tax. If you’re between 55 and 64 you
have to pay five times as much as a young person and you
get fewer tax credits.”
As a former director of the advocacy group the Gray
Panthers, Wyden says his background is working with the
elderly. Though many of the organization’s branches sup-
port a national single-payer health care system, Wyden says
he’s concerned about funding and about the transition from
the Affordable Health Care Act to a single-payer system and
did not say if he supported a “Medicare for all” type system.
“There’s going to have to be some money in the transi-
tion, which is what both California and Vermont, that looked
at single payer, that was their problem. They could not find
the money to make the transition,” Wyden says.
The senator proposes that employers give workers “the
money that they have now spent by their employer on health
care. It is a business write-off to the employer, it’s tax-free
to the worker and that’s another part of the debate, but that
would be the revenue that would finally provide the oppor-
tunity for a transition if the state wanted to go forward,”
he says.
Wyden adds that there are two choices for a sin-
gle-payer system. He says there are a number of
bills that he’s currently looking at — like the
bill proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. “You
can have those bills and we all know that
Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and
Paul Ryan are not going to be tripping
over themselves to advance those bills.
They will not have hearings on them,
there will be no debate about them —
that’s that,” he says.
The other choice Wyden sug-
gests would be for states to pursue
their own single-payer or public
health care option via section 1332,
a section he added to Obama’s Af-
fordable Healthcare Act. The sec-
tion provides innovation waivers
so states currently have a variety of
choices that don’t need authorization
from the federal government. “If Or-
egon wanted to team up with California
and Washington, we could have a West
Coast effort where you would have pro-
gressives in three states where there would
be interest,” he says.
Wyden is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He pressed Attorney General Jeff Sessions during a two-hour-
plus public hearing about Russia and asked about former FBI
Director James Comey’s testimony. During the hearing Wyden
told Sessions that he wasn’t answering the questions, saying,
“Mr. Comey said that there were matters with the respect of the
recusal that were problematic and he couldn’t talk about them.
What are they?”
Sessions responded, “Why don’t you tell me? There are
none, Senator Wyden. There are none.” When asked if Ses-
sions was allowed to withhold that information by saying that
his conversations with President Trump were confidential,
Wyden says that he and “several other members asked about
this and we asked under what legal authority are you doing this
and they would say things like ‘it’s appropriate’ and the like.”
EW revisited a question posed to Wyden in January in light
of new intelligence reports about the Russian election hacking.
In January, when asked about Trump’s actions with regard to
the travel ban and attacks on the media, he said, “Well, look,
the president won the election.”
But since then, testimony from intelligence officials before
the Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed that “a small
number of networks were successfully compromised, there
were a larger number of states where attempts to compromise
networks were unsuccessful, and there were an even greater
number of states where only preparatory activity like scan-
ning was observed,” according to the testimonies of Jeanette
Manfra and Samuel Liles with the Department of Homeland
Security.
“So when I’m asked about this, look, I don’t see any evi-
dence of this, but if Donald Trump thinks that there is evidence
of this or anybody else does, you folks ought to sign on to take
Oregon vote by mail national,” Wyden says. “My sense is that
if you look at those states, those Midwestern states, Wisconsin,
Michigan, Ohio and further east to Pennsylvania, Trump went
there and showed up and Hillary Clinton didn’t — so that’s my
take on what happened.”
As the president continues to communicate through so-
cial media where he has made false accusations pertaining to
taped conversations with James Comey and continues to attack
members of the press, EW asked Wyden how the president’s
actions make him feel as a U.S. Senator.
“The founding fathers really thought that the free press in a
lot of respects was more important than government if you go
back and look at the writing. So I find this very troubling, these
attacks on the press,” Wyden says. “I believe that America is
strongest when we set the bar high, and the kinds of things that
are coming out from the tweets don’t exactly fit that defini-
tion.”
Wyden wouldn’t speculate on who he thinks will run in
2020, but he says he will not run for president. He says he “has
the best job in the world,” adding that he calls himself the des-
ignated driver of all the Democrats planning a presidential run.
These days he’d need a “Greyhound bus” to pick up everyone
running when before he just needed a van.
When asked about Trump running for reelection, he says,
“I think that — if he gets through all this — he’ll definitely
run again.”
‘I believe that America is strongest when
we set the bar high, and the kinds of things
that are coming out from the tweets don’t
exactly fit that definition.’
eugeneweekly.com • July 13, 2017
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