In 2nd District, GOP has a 100-fold spending advantage : Stltoday

In 2nd District, GOP has a 100-fold spending advantage : Stltoday

click link

snip

 I’m not happy with the way things are going in Congress,” he said of his decision to run this year. “There’s too much posturing, too much taking ideological stands.”

Koenen says he has a chance to win because the district’s GOP tinge is not quite as pronounced as it used to be, because some Democratic-leaning areas were added in the reapportionment after the 2010 census.
However, Kenneth Warren, a political science professor at St. Louis University and an expert on voting trends, says the district remains solidly Republican.

On the Obama health plan, Koenen supports it as a “very necessary first step” toward what he hopes will be an eventual expansion of Medicare to the entire population over 10 to 20 years.
“In the long term the amount of money we spend on medical care will be the same,”
 he said.
Wagner calls the Obama plan “a supreme overreach of the federal government” imposing “daunting” new regulation and taxes that will hinder economic growth.

She supports alternatives such as increasing competition by allowing insurance companies to market health care policies across state lines.
Meanwhile, she attacks the single-payer plan Koenen advocates for the more distant future as “basic socialism in health care.”