Nothing to Crow About

Kaiser Health News has a new article today -- headlined: "Doctors, Hospitals, Insurers, Pharma Come Out Ahead With Health Bill" -- which begins as follows: "Most health industry sectors are winners -- some bigger than others -- under sweeping health care legislation that will expand coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans over the next decade, analysts say." It details the massive benefits each industry receives (compared to their mild costs) [and] the success they had in killing any real competition and reform in the bill (i.e., the public option, Medicare expansion, drug-reimportation, bulk price negotiations, and an end to the insurers' anti-trust exemption).

[...]

one wants to argue that this is a good bill, that's reasonable, but to claim that it is an example of Democrats' "standing up to special interests and the health insurance lobby" is so blatantly false that everyone -- especially supposedly independent commentators -- should be deeply embarrassed to espouse it.

  Glenn Greenwald

Staffed with the very best from the league of conventional politics, [Obama's] team bought off PhRMA (with the promise not to use market forces to force market prices for prescription drugs), and the insurance industry (with the promise[...] that they would face no new competition from a public option), so that by the end, as [Glenn] Greenwald puts it, the administration succeeded in "bribing and accommodating them to such an extreme degree that they ended up affirmatively supporting a bill that lavishes them with massive benefits." Obama didn't "push back on the undue influence of special interests," as he said today. He bought them off.

  Huffington Post

At the public's expense.

And while we're trading and buying….

The health care reform bill signed into law by President Barack Obama Tuesday requires members of Congress and their office staffs to buy insurance through the state-run exchanges it creates – but it may exempt staffers who work for congressional committees or for party leaders in the House and Senate.

Staffers and members on both sides of the aisle call it an “inequity” and an “outrage” – a loophole that exempts the staffers most involved in writing and passing the bill from one of its key requirements.

  Politico

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.