lbj, met ben nelson

LBJ, Meet Ben Nelson

Those of us long in the tooth remember Lyndon Johnson, the Texan who succeeded John Kennedy. Well, LBJ would be right at home in the wheeling and dealing in Washington these days. So much money has been spent, we can’t comprehend it.

The stimulus bill is a done deal. Almost a trillion dollars. You know how much that is? If you started the day Jesus was born and spent a million bucks a day, you still would not have spent a trillion dollars.

Now while the world is constantly changing, it seems about the only thing that remains the same is politics and politicians, ninety-nine percent of which give the other one percent a bad name.
Politicians are still cutting deals behind closed doors, buying off each other, and doling out copious amounts of largesse at the taxpayers’ expense.

And this largesse has never been more obvious than in the Senate’s Health bill.
You’re all aware of Nebraskagate, and if you aren’t, then you’re probably a typical voter.

But anyway, Demo Senator Ben Nelson sold out his vote if the government would pay Nebraska’s Medicaid of $100 million over ten years; Blue Cross Blue Shield and Mutual of Omaha of that state would be exempt from annual fees on insurers; and a physician-owed hospital would get referrals from doctors who own it.

Who pays for all that? The other forty-nine states.

Those who see nothing wrong with this, I’d appreciate it if you’d send me your name and I’ll let you pay my share.

The guy who wrote the senate bill, Max Baucus believes insurance commissioners are taking kickbacks, yet he included no reform for these companies’ regulation. In fact, he put an entire town in his state on Medicare whether citizens were qualified or not. That was his payoff.

In addition, the Los Angeles Times reported that 166 aides from the nine congressional leadership offices and five committees involved in shaping healthcare overhaul legislation, along with 13 former lawmakers, are registered to represent at least 338 healthcare clients.

And don’t go getting all that excited about pre-existing health conditions being covered. Do you actually believe you could call up an insurance company and say “hey, my house just burned. I need insurance,” and they would greet you with open arms?

According to People’s Daily, those ‘pre-existing’ clients will go into a high risk pools with sky high insurance rates.

Neither the House nor Senate bill cover everyone as the liberals first proclaimed, but both bills plan on cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in future payment to doctors, hospitals, and other health providers who care for Medicare patients according to The Associated Press.

Cutting pay results in one obvious fact, lower quality medical care.

However slick and devious LBJ might have been, he could take lessons from those sleazy excuses for humans who are jamming this through for their own benefit.

According to the People Daily, Aetna Health Insurance sent Senator Joe Lieberman over $100,000.00 to go to bat for their company when creating the health bill. And he went to bat for them. He killed the public option, which took away a lower government price, forcing people to buy from Aetna and other insurance companies. That might not be so scary, but he gave all the insurance companies anti-trust exemptions.

To boil it all down, and I wish we could boil it away, the Senate bill contains 47 amendments that will benefit the health care industry, and higher taxes for taxpayers with poorer medical care.

I read a horror book about a gypsy putting curses on people. One curse was turning their skin to that of a reptile, one quite deserving for those like Lieberman and Nelson, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and the other fifty-seven so-called ‘public servants’ in the Senate who sold out the American people for what they could gain.