Health Care Debate: Follow the Money

From NPR:

When 22 senators started working over the first health care overhaul bill on June 17, the news cameras were pointed at them — except for NPR’s photographer, who turned his lens on the lobbyists. Whatever bill emerges from Congress will affect one-sixth of the economy, and stakeholders have mobilized. We’ve begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going. Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is — e-mail dollarpolitics@npr.org or let us know via Twitter @DollarPolitics.

Click here to see who is in the room. A sobering view of how bills are actually crafted in Washington.

From the Baltimore Chronicle:

Senator Max Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee are too corrupted by corporate health industry profiteers donations to give America the health care policy it needs.

Health care is 15% of the U.S. gross domestic product. U.S. health care expenditures, which have been rising rapidly for several years, surpassed $2.4 trillion in 2007, more than three times the $714 billion spent in 1990. The cost of health care is projected to reach $4.4 trillion by 2018. There is a lot of room for corporate profiteering in the increasing cost of health care. The millions the health care industry has invested in Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee could therefore turn out to be very profitable.

Sen. Max Baucus is leading the debate on health care reform from his perch on the Senate Finance Committee. The health industry has heavily invested in him.

According to OpenSecrets.org, over his career he has taken donations from:

  • The Insurance Industry: $1,170,313
  • Health Professionals: $1,016,276
  • Pharmaceuticals/Health Products Industry: $734,605
  • Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $541,891
  • Health Services/HMOs: $439,700
Baucus has shown his bias and should be removed from leading the health care reform effort by the Democratic Party leadership.

That is a grand total of $3,902,785. Can we trust Baucus to put aside the profits of the industries that have kept him in the Senate? Will he put the people’s necessities ahead of the profits of his contributors? Baucus has shown his bias and should be removed from leading the health care reform effort by the Democratic Party leadership.

What was the industry’s investment in him in 2008?

  • Insurance: $592,185
  • Health Professionals: $537,141
  • Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $524,813
  • Health Services/HMOs: $364,500
  • Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $332,826

That is $1,826,652 Baucus took from these industries, and now he can reward them by deforming health care reform.

Learn more about the Senate Finance Committee at their own website. Click here.
Follow all hearings on health care reform at C-SPAN.

Leave a Reply