The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.
The tactic is so widespread that three of every four major health-care firms have at least one former insider on their lobbying payrolls, according to The Washington Post's analysis.
Congratulations to Al Franken!
Thanks for taking down the pestiferous Norm Coleman, who had usurped
the seat of Paul Wellstone and who had refused to give it up for way
too long.
Good riddance, Norm Coleman.
And take that, Bill O’Reilly, the big bully who trashed Franken at every opportunity, and then some.
Franken is also to be praised for his pioneering work in progressive
talk radio, having launched Air America when many, like O’Reilly, said
it couldn’t be done.
President Obama held a town hall on
Health Care Reform last week, broadcast nationwide on ABC with Charlie
Gibson and Diane Sawyer. Once again, even though a majority of the
public and now even a majority of doctors in the US favor a
single-payer system, single payer was still off the table.
The president of the AMA, which opposes single payer, nowadays
representing about a 19 percent minority of doctors, was prominently on
display.
After last year's elections, a Democratic operative told me that if the
Democrats got to 59 seats in the Senate, it would be easy to peel off
one or two Republicans to pass key legislation like serious health care
reform. I was left wondering what political planet he'd been living on
for the past three decades.
God I hope David Broder is wrong. "The President has told visitors,"
the Washington Post columnist wrote last week, "that he would rather
have 70 votes in the Senate for a bill that gives him 85 percent of
what he wants rather than a 100 percent satisfactory bill that passes
52-48." The good news is that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is now
talking about how bipartisanship may need to be redefined downward if
the Democrats are going to pass meaningful healthcare reform.
So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.
But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came
from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most
rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have
to do something about greenhouse gases.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help
thinking that I was watching a form of treason - treason against the
planet.
Two things bother me about Obama's press conference performance on Tuesday.
And they concern two big issues: health care and the economy.
He's backsliding on both.
On health care, he was pressed by reporters who followed up on each others' questions-a good, new journalistic skill that evidently fell from the sky after Bush left office.
What they were pressing him on was whether his public option for health care was non-negotiable.
Fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats and Obama supporters, we are
at a moment of truth, a pivotal turning point -- in the form of what
happens in the next days and weeks with robust, universal health
reform. A fork in the road socially, economically -- and politically.
It could go either way depending on Obama and the Democratic
officeholders many of us worked so hard to elect. They have the power
to act, but will they use it -- or lose it?
WASHINGTON -
At the Joseph Farms dairy in Atwater (Merced County), farmers aren't just transforming milk into cheese. They've also figured out how to turn manure into fuel - and a paycheck.
By storing waste from the dairy's 5,000 cows in a covered 7-acre lagoon and removing methane from it using sophisticated equipment, the farm is generating power that keeps refrigerators, lights and pumps running at its cheese plant.
Earlier this year, Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, warned about what she called "the futility of piecemeal tinkering."
Obama and the Democrats did not heed her warning.
Earlier this week, the most liberal of the Democrats tinkering plans
- Senator Kennedy's - went up in smoke when the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) estimated that the Kennedy plan would cost $1 trillion
over ten years and still leave 37 million Americans uninsured.
