Can Progressives Win House Seats Where Bernie Showed More Support Than Trump, But Where Trump Beat Hillary? Meet Neill Mohammad (IL-16)

Illinois' 16th congressional district-- which includes Dixon, Reagan's birthplace-- starts up at the Wisconsin border just below Beloit and goes into the eastern part of Rockford, swings south and east into the Chicago exurbs below Joliet and then east to the Indiana border and then south towards Bloomington and Peoria. It's a red district but it celebrated the hometown boy good will to give Obama a narrow win in 2008. Romney beat him in 2012 though, 53-45%, and last year it was Trump country. He beat Hillary 55.5% to 38.3%. She was the wrong candidate for the district. In the primary Bernie beat her in every single one of the district's 14 counties-- and it is her home state-- and on primary day Bernie also beat Trump-- 93,397 to 89,599.

• Boone- Bernie- 2,773; Trump- 3,816
• Bureau- Bernie- 1,852; Trump- 2,185
• DeKalb- Bernie- 8,315; Trump- 5,139
• Ford- Bernie- 438; Trump- 1,244
• Grundy- Bernie- 3,095; Trump- 3,625
• Iroquois- Bernie-875 ; Trump- 2,836
• LaSalle- Bernie- 6,739 ; Trump- 6,950
• Lee- Bernie- 1,958; Trump- 2,153
• Livingston- Bernie- 971; Trump- 2,846
• Ogle- Bernie- 2,642; Trump- 4,029
• Putnam- Bernie- 504; Trump- 415
• Stark- Bernie- 215; Trump- 397
• Will- Bernie- 46,305; Trump- 38,507
• Winnebago- Bernie- 16,715; Trump- 15,457

If the Democrats nominate another incremental centrist like Hillary, they'll continue losing districts like IL-16. But the self-serving Democratic Establishment which lives, like the self-serving Republican Establishment, first and foremost for corruption. They would rather nominate another dismal Hillary-type than allow a progressive to claim the nomination and beat Trump.

The congressman from IL-16 is mainstream conservative Adam Kinzinger, who is pretty popular. Kinzinger was reelected without an opponent. Two years earlier he beat his Democratic opponent 70.6% to 29.4% and the first time he ran, in 2014, he took the seat 61.8% to 38.2%. Nevertheless, this cycle, sensing an anti-Trump/anti-Ryan tsunami, there are already 4 Democrats vying for the nomination to take on Kinzinger-- "ex"-Republican Christopher Minelli (gun nut and anti single player conservative), Nathan Arroyave (progressive), Sara Dady (progressive) and Neill Mohammad (progressive). Neill, born and raised in DeKalb, a product of that city's public schools and a political science graduate from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, works as a health care management consultant.


A Candidate Can Be For Single Payer And Universal Healthcare And Still Be Skeptical About H.R. 676
-by Neill Mohammad

Health care is a personal issue for me.

My mom has suffered from Crohn’s Disease for most of her life. As a kid, that meant a lot of anxious, sleepless nights, worrying about what could happen to her, and if something did, who would care for me and my brother.

But as hard as it was to grow up with a parent with a serious illness, the one thing I never had to worry about was whether my mom was going to be able to get the health care that she needed.

I was stunned when Adam Kinzinger-- our current Congressional representative in Illinois’ 16th District-- voted to take healthcare away from the tens millions of working families who need it to live productive lives, care for their children, and contribute to their communities.

Adam co-sponsored a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act on just his fourth day in office. In his subsequent six years in Congress he voted dozens of times to bring back medical bankruptcy, lifetime benefit caps, and price-gouging for anyone with a preexisting condition. He voted to kill the Medicaid program, which would kick 6 in every 10 seniors living in nursing homes out onto the street.

Despite all that, I’ve been excited and encouraged to see just how far our public discussion on healthcare has come in just the last few years.

Support for universal healthcare isn’t a niche issue anymore. It’s the bare minimum expected of any progressive political candidate.

We all agree why we need a universal system of coverage, like a single-payer insurance program such as “Medicare for All.” Universal coverage will drive down costs and put patients’ well-being ahead of corporate profits.

Universal coverage will, at long last, end the absurd connection between what job we work at and what kind of care we have access to.

Your boss shouldn’t get decide what doctor you get to see. No  woman should have to go without reproductive health care just because the only place in town that happened to be hiring last week was Hobby Lobby.

We all know why we need real changes in the way that we deliver and pay for healthcare. How we get there, though, is still murky.

Many of the activists I talk to on the trail believe that we already have a solution in hand: the United States National Health Care Act, or H.R. 676. H.R. 676 would replace all other forms of health insurance outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service.

While I appreciate Rep. John Conyers’ longstanding leadership on this issue, simply passing H.R. 676 won’t do it in itself. It is a fantastic statement of purpose, but as a roadmap for the future it has serious shortcomings. If we want to realize our dreams of a more humane system of care in this country, we need to be honest in addressing those flaws.

And we need to address them now. Opportunities for meaningful healthcare reform don’t come around very often, and I don’t want to risk jeopardizing the window in front of us with a flawed and incomplete bill. As it stands today, HR 676:

• Does not explain how Medicaid will be merged with the Medicare-for-All system. Medicaid, which insures 70 million Americans-- more than Medicare, covers extremely high-risk patients, many of which receive services which are currently excluded from Medicare. Despite that, Medicaid is an efficient and successful program.


• Outlaws any kind of supplemental coverage outside of a single-payer system, even though supplemental policies feature prominently in many systems with universal coverage, such as France and Canada. The reality is that supplemental insurance is going to be a political necessity to get a universal healthcare bill passed, and supplemental insurance has not posed any threat to the basic quality of care or access in those other countries.


• Maintains traditional Medicare’s “fee for service” model, which we know produces the wrong kind of incentives for reducing costs. It encourages providers to direct patients to unnecessary and redundant scans and other diagnostic tests.


Medicaid is responsible for the care of the sickest and most vulnerable Americans, such as nursing home residents, the severely disabled, and infant children. The lack of detail in the bill means that pushing Medicaid recipients into a different program is risky if we don’t give careful consideration to what change will look like.

Let me explain why.

Unlike Medicare, Medicaid already offers comprehensive health insurance and includes coverage for hearing, vision, and ancillary services like long-term care. Medicaid also has extremely low or zero cost-sharing for most enrollees, unlike traditional Medicare, which has large deductibles and no limit on out-of-pocket expenses.

Many seniors enroll in Medicaid precisely so they can cover the bills the Medicare won’t pay-- things like long-term nursing care.

As former CMS director Andy Slavitt and many scholars have pointed out, Medicaid provides high quality care at a lower cost than commercial employer plans and Medicare. Despite covering these lower reimbursement rates, research from the Kaiser Foundation has shown that people on Medicaid report similar access to care and similar satisfaction rates to those with commercial plans.

Finally, we know that it is straightforward to expand Medicaid to the uninsured with minimal disruption. The program started as a small plan to cover mothers and children on welfare in the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, it expanded to cover the disabled, all parents, as well as many more children. After the 2010 passage of the ACA, it expanded to become universal for all members of households under 138 percent of the poverty line, which granted more than 12 million uninsured Americans access to health care.

All of this was done with relatively little disruption to the group insurance market. That lack of disruption is politically important-- since most people aren’t sick, many Americans remain happy with the commercial insurance they get through their employers. I’ve even talked to voters who, understandably, see Medicare as a potential downgrade versus what they have now.

These challenges are all surmountable, but they are real challenges. That’s why we need to continue to focus the political debate on the ends of healthcare reform-- why health insurance needs to be universal-- even while we continue to work on the right means of getting there.

I support Medicare for All. But I’d also be perfectly happy with Germany’s system, which is built on private insurance programs which are tightly regulated. Or France’s system, which includes private supplementary insurance alongside their government program. I don’t want to rule out any potential solution as long as it fulfills all of the basic expectations of a universal coverage system.

Some Democrats are already acting in that spirit and moving the ball forward. Sen. Brian Schatz has just introduced a bill for a universal Medicaid buy-in, which would address coverage and access issues under the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile, Sen. Sherrod Brown and six other Senators have introduced a Medicare buy-in for people over 55. I’d support both of these ideas while expanding federal support for Medicaid further to reach more people-- including households within 200 percent or more of the poverty line.

Like Schatz-- who’s said he’d support Conyers plan, and will likely sign on to Bernie Sanders’ single-payer plan-- I want to build a universal coverage plan that works.

We only get so many chances at real healthcare reform. We have to make the most of this opportunity. We have to get it right.


If you'd like to learn more about Neill and his campaign, this is his official website.