UPDATE: I've been correct that this ad was not approved by the site, but is a targeted Google ad to my district.
I know that the Kos community decided to take opposing advertising in the hope that they could take the money and use it for a better cause. However, the recent "thank you" to Bob Dold ads are getting to me, so I wrote up this post for my own Illinois Tenth Congressional District blog to make sure everyone knows what they are all about. I'm cross posting here because Kos is running the ad prominently on its front page:
Just a warning. If you click around the Internet political sites, you're going to see ads thanking Bob Dold for protecting Medicare. The ads are sponsored by a group called the 60 Plus Association. The group claims to be a non-partisan senior citizen advocacy group. The truth is that it's a front group for big pharma with ties to the national GOP. It's funded by "PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), CBM (Citizens for Better Medicare) and three drug companies (Merck, Pfizer and Wyeth-Ayerst) plus another $300,000 from Hanwha International Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of a Korean conglomerate with chemical and pharmaceutical interests," and works with Bonner & Associates a firm, "which specializes in astroturf lobbying." See the quotes at the links from Sourcewatch.
The 60 Plus Association worked against health care reform and against the Clinton prescription drug benefit that failed and eventually caused republicans to sponsor the failing Medicare D, failing because it enriches pharmaceutical companies, but doesn't save seniors a dime. I wrote about this several days ago prompted by my father looking through his and my mom's Medicare D payments and prescription bills. Dad concluded that they didn't save a dime and because of that he's currently not on a Medicare D plan. I found that many seniors have given up these plans for similar reasons.
The vote for which they're "thanking" (more like advertising) Dold is the budget vote. Dold voted for Paul Ryan's idea of Medicare, turning the program into a voucher program so senior citizens are given some money to spend it on health care in the private market.
I'm sure those in the Kos community know that one major reason for the Medicare program, in addition to making health care accessible to seniors, was to keep them out of the insurance pools that cover everyone else to keep the price down for the rest of us. Flooding seniors into the pools and private market is going to push premiums up because they are more likely to require more and more expensive medical services.
So, not only would any logical senior not thank Dold for his vote to kill Medicare in favor of a voucher program, younger and healthier people shouldn't thank him either because it's going to raise their insurance premiums too. It's called supply and demand and with all their talk about it you'd think republicans would understand it by now.
It's a shame Bob Dold is going down the same path as Mark Kirk did, taking (purchasing ?) fake thanks from fake groups that lie about who they represent, who they want to help and what they intend to promote. Kirk took similar "thank you" ads from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for working to kill health care reform and prevent discussion of plans that might have really operated to lower costs and insurance premiums.