Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
President Barack Obama’s meetings Tuesday afternoon with Democratic members of the two Senate committees writing health care bills has Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley nervous that Republican concerns are going to be ignored.
“Today, we’ve reached a fork in the road”, Grassley said. “The president this very day, this afternoon can make a very big difference” on whether it’s a bipartisan bill or not.
When he met with Obama last month the president said he’d “rather have a bipartisan bill that didn’t have everything he wants than a partisan one that would include 100 percent of what he wants,” Grassley said. With the scale change being talked about, moving forward without Republican input would be a mistake, he said.
“Health care is 16 percent of our Gross [Domestic] Product, and I happen to think that if Congress is going to pass one bill restructuring 16 percent of the Gross [Domestic] Product… that you’d want a broad based consensus of how you ought to do that.,” he said.
Grassley, as the senior Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, is expected to be highly involved in crafting health care legislation. Several reports indicate that Democrats will insist that a public health insurance option be included in any health care legislation, an idea Grassley has spoken publicly against several times.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers Tuesday released a report detailing the potential economic gains from reform, finding it could result in an additional $10,000 in income by 2030 for a family of four.
The report found that in Iowa the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family coverage rose from $5,952 in 1996 to $11,070 in 2006.
Health care expenditures currently account for 18 percent of our nation’s GDP, the report said, and “if we remain on our current path, health care spending is expected to reach 34 percent of GDP by 2040.”
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