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Rokita visits to gauge marching orders
Todd Rokita came to say thank you but said so much more Monday morning in Greencastle.
Making the Putnam County Courthouse Square one of eight stops on his 4th District “Thank You Tour,” U.S. Congressman Rokita met with a small but vocal group at Almost Home to discuss making America great again.
“We wanted to say thanks to everybody who came out this week of Thanksgiving,” he told the group. “We wanted to hear from the people what our marching orders are.”
So far, he said, those constituency urgings have included assurances that “the Republican Party not back down” and that the government “get something done.”
“Those two comments jibe for sure,” Rokita noted, adding that they click with work that was done last week when congressmen met face to face with Vice President-elect Mike Pence.
“As second in command of the budget,” Rokita said of his Committee on the Budget assignment, “I’m going to have a huge” -- catching himself to pronounce huge as “hooge” ala Donald Trump -- before adding, “role in what Mr. Trump does.”
Winning his fourth term in Congress as a result of the Republican landslide in Indiana, the 46-year-old Rokita quickly rattled off the priorities he sees in the 2017 session of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Repealing “Obamacare,” as the Affordable Care Act has become popularly known, for one. And tax reform for another.
Rokita said the Republicans need to “stay together and think big and get Obamacare replaced and maybe tax reform too. This is real. An Obamacare repeal can happen this year.”
Of course, that would necessitate some replacement. And Rokita said some of the replacement value might come in retaining some portions of the program, such as the rule that allows children to stay on their parents’ health insurance policy until they are 26 years old.
He also noted that any health care reform may take pre-existing conditions off the table, creating instead a high-risk pool that the government would fund. That could be paid for, Rokita suggested, by the savings of repealing Obamacare and relying on consumer-driven health care.
Meanwhile, Rokita reasoned, “if you’re going to have consumer-driven health care, the consumers have got to know the price.”
Health care savings accounts, he said, will help drive the demand for transparency in health care.
“We ought to have the same opportunity (with health care) as when we go out and buy a set of four tires,” he said. “I want to know what Goodyear’s got and what somebody else has got.”
The congressman would also like to see the recognition that “98 percent of health-care transactions are not emergencies.”
“If I go out and break my leg, I’m going to the emergency room,” he reasoned, adding that a “gross example” to the opposite extreme finds “people taking ambulance rides to the emergency room because they have a headache and want some free aspirin.”
Rokita was asked about his take on the lack of civility seen not only on the campaign trail but following the election outcome.
The congressman said rather forcefully that he is not for using “capital or time to address whiny people who don’t like the results of an election.”
“I’m happy to listen to all Hoosiers and all Americans on their issues,” Rokita assured in promising to address campaign promises and move forward. “We want to get to the issues ... they’re heady.
“People are welcome to protest,” he concluded, “they’re not welcome to riot.”