How Much Does Health Care Reform Cost? Ask a Lobbyist
An article about which Senators were crucial to the Health Care Reform bill and how lobbyists and campaign contributions may have swayed their decision.
To give you some perspective the Dow Jones gained only 2.3% and the Nasdaq gaining only a 1.4% increase in the same period.
Why this incredible gain in numbers from an industry which Health Care Reform is supposed to work against?
Simply because on October 27, 2009, Independent Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut threatened to filibuster any health care bill that contained a Public Option, according to Shahein Nasiripour using google finance, writer for the Huffington Post.
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut would not vote for this bill unless the public option was removed, then he removed the provision that would expand Medicare coverage from 65 years old and up to people 55 years old and up. Which is surprising because less than two months before killing that proposal he argued for the exact same Medicare expansion.
Flip-Flop? At the time, Joe Lieberman seemed like the only one preventing this bill from going forward. He gained the full attention of the media and of course the lobbyists.
So the Democrats caved in because one man from Connecticut didn’t like something that would change the Health Care System for over 360 million Americans. But in satisfying Joe Lieberman, who’s wife once worked for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant who has outspent all other pharmaceutical companies in lobbying this year with over $16 million, and Hoffman-La Roche, a Health Insurance Company, the Democrats still did not have the 60 votes needed to end the opposition.
But Lieberman isn’t going to seem so bad after I tell you about this next politician, Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat from Nebraska. Sen Nelson was the last Democrat to agree to vote for the Health Care Reform bill. In holding out until the end he successfully garnered all the attention that Lieberman had before him. Everyone who could win or lose from this bill has dialing Sen Nelson’s office attempting to settle a deal that would substantially change the Health Care Industry in this country for all time and change “…the best health care system the world has ever known.“ according to Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican from Alabama. Even though the American Medical Association found that in 2007 over 60% of all bankruptcies filed in the US are directly linked to medical bills.
Sen Nelson provided the ‘magical’ 60th vote, as some are calling it. Nelson’s issue with the bill had to do with abortion, so he claims. He wanted abortion to be regulated by each state individually with no Federal government influence. That seems like a fair argument. But on the last day of negotiations, Sen Nelson snuck in a very special earmark.
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