The Power of the Insurance and Drug Industries Over the Federal Government…
Read this ….The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind
From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries — and their army of lobbyists — had control over the process that resulted in a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis byNorthwestern University‘s Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: “a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companieswith a stake in health care legislation.”
The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for — some 338 of them — spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent — delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit.
Now you know why this bill passed. Not for the well being of you and your children, but for the wealth being and the profits of the insurance and drug companies….
