California Eye » Corruption

GOP Rep. Joe Barton apologizes to BP

Featheriver — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:00:57 +0000

Joe Barton (R-TX) was on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee yesterday when BP officials appeared in Congress.

Barton made the following remarks to the BP company.

I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown.

Good old Joe. He is steadfastly sticking to the Republican plan to criticize President Obama at every opportunity. Barton added “I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday.”

…it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown…

[Source: Talking Points Memo]

What is wrong with some of these republicans? They don’t want corporations regulated. They side with corporate businesses ignoring the people of the gulf coast who are having to endure the damage caused by the oil spill.

Barton was born in Waco, Texas. He is a graduate of Texas A&M holding a B.S. degree in industrial engineering. He was also a consultant for Atlantic Richfield Oil and Gas Company before being elected to Congress in 1984. He represents the 6th congressional district in Texas.

Barton has taken $1.4 million in campaign contributions from the Oil industry since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He Barton has consistently opposed proposals to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil.

That he doesn’t care about ordinary people was shown by Barton’s opposition to the Combating Autism Act of 2006. But he takes care of his family. He paid his wife, Terri, $57,759 in salary and bonuses from his campaign funds in the 2006 election cycle. He also paid his daughter, Kristin, $12,622 in salary and bonuses. Additionally he paid his mother, Nell Barton, $7,000 for a car.

Makes one wonder what is wrong with Texas voters in the 6th District.

He established the Barton Family Foundation to support charities in his congressional district. His daughter-in-law, Amy Barton, is the Foundations Executive Director. Major energy corporations, such as the Chicago-based nuclear energy producer, Exelon Corporation, make major gifts to the Foundation. In June 2008, at a time when Barton had introduced legislation to assist corporations with the recycling of spent nuclear fuel, the corporation donated $25,000 to the Foundation. Exelon has also donated $80,000 to Barton’s campaign funds.

Barton voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. He also voted against the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Barton has received almost $2.2 million from the Healthcare industry, $1.5 million of that coming from PACs. [Wikipedia]

Jack Abramoff Out of the Joint

Featheriver — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:51:31 +0000

Jack Abramoff, disgraced former lobbyist, was transferred Tuesday from prison to a Maryland halfway house to serve out the remainder of his sentence. [CREW] He is scheduled for release on December 4.

Abramoff, once a high-rolling Republican lobbyist, pleaded guilty to a raft of federal corruption charges in 2006. He admitted illegally showering gifts on officials who provided favors for his clients and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Among other things, the inquiry led to prison time for a former congressman, Ohio Republican Bob Ney; for Stephen Griles, once the Bush administration’s deputy interior secretary; and for several former congressional staffers.

Abramoff is one of the symbols of money corruption in Congress. He was one of the lobbyists who carried bags of money to some members of Congress buying their influence to gain advantages for his clients and himself.

Free showing of Capitalism: A Love Story in Pahrump

Featheriver — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:29:27 +0000

Citizens of Pahrump will be treated to a free showing of Michael Moore’s new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story.

Capitalism: A Love Story is a 2009 American documentary film directed, written by and starring Michael Moore. The film centers on the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the recovery stimulus, while putting forward an indictment of the current economic order in the United States and capitalism in general.

Topics covered include Wall Street‘s “casino mentality”, for-profit prisons, Goldman Sachs‘ influence in Washington, DC, the poverty-level wages of many airline pilots, the large wave of home foreclosures, and the consequences of “runaway greed.”

The film also features a religious component where Moore examines whether or not capitalism is a sin and if Jesus would be a capitalist.

When and where is it showing for free in Pahrump?

When: Sunday, March 28, 2010
Time: 2:00 p.m.
Where: Salvation Army, 721 S. Buol Road, Pahrump, NV
Admission: Free
RSVP: Val Von Holt at (775) 751-1776

The Moore film has won awards at the Venice Film Festival, the “Leoncino d’Oro” (“Little Golden Lion”) award for his documentary, and he also received the festival’s Open Prize. The documentary was also nominated for the festival’s Golden Lion award.

The film runs for 127 minutes. I’ve seen it twice. I can tell you that if you are into politics at all you will find the film enlightening and it will hold your undivided attention. Be sure to go to the bathroom before the film starts.

A tip of my hat to Val Von Holt and Margery Kay Hanson for putting all this together.

Why there is no single-payer public option

Featheriver — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:53:07 +0000

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now stated “Republican lawmakers remained staunchly opposed to using the federal government to regulate health insurance.” Republicans want the current health care bill dumped in the trash and to start all over.

Goodman interviewed Trudy Lieberman (no relationship with Joe Lieberman that I know of) a contributing editor and blogger to Columbia Journalism Review. Lieberman noted, “as a country, we are still extremely divided….We have a deep cleavage in this country about how much government should do and how much government should not do.” She referred to the issue of how much regulation of insurance companies should government engage in.

Goodman quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Obama: “…a year ago…you (Obama) said ‘The public option is one way to keep the insurance companies honest and to increase competition.’”

Quoting Pelosi further, “the public option, which would save $120 billion, keep the insurance companies honest, and increase competition.” Pelosi continued, referring to Senator’s Enzi, Snowe and Durbin proposing exchanges “because the insurance companies opposed the public option. They couldn’t take the competition.”

So Goodman asked Lieberman “Why did President Obama drop the public option?”

Lieberman didn’t know but speculated that it was because, perhaps, campaign contributors to the Obama campaign, stakeholders such as insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, the business community led by the Chamber of Commerce, didn’t want the public option.

Goodman turned to her other guest, Dr. Margaret Flowers, a Baltimore pediatrician and congressional fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program, who is in favor of a single-payer public option.

Dr. Flowers responded “we’ve been excluded from this discussion….the special interests …have been involved in this process.”

“…the President and Congress are talking about—cost controls, increasing coverage, excluding pre-existing conditions—all of these would be met through a national Medicare-for-All system. But—so we win, you know, on the policy. But there is such a heavy influence from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that they, I guess, felt threatened by the presence of the single-payer advocates.”

Goodman fortified Dr. Flowers assessment of why the single payer public option has failed. “Just looking at a report from the National Journal by Ashlie Rodriguez, who writes, ‘Health care interests have given $46.6 million in campaign donations since 2005 to [the] 21 lawmakers’ at the bipartisan healthcare summit, including Senator Max Baucus, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, and to the summit’s host, President Obama, according to this new report.”

Goodman added, “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that health professionals, political action committees, hospitals and nursing homes, pharmaceutical and health product companies, health services firms, SHMOs and accident insurers have given heavily to all summit attendees.”

Goodman then asked Dr. Flowers, “How dies that affect this discussion…?”

Dr. Flowers’s response was, “…pretty strongly….members of congress need to get reelected, and if they speak out against the interests who are funding their campaigns, they’re not going to get that funding.”

Flowers added,

Because we have this system of multiple private, for-profit—or profit-driven, really—insurance companies—their bottom line is not health; it’s profit—we’re wasting a third of our healthcare dollars, over $400 billion a year at this time.

——————

The foregoing focuses upon the impact of campaign fund money to members of Congress that precludes good legislation for the benefit of ordinary citizens. It is a major problem in government which has to be ended. The only way I know how to do that is to cease voting for members of congress that represent moneyed special interests rather than their constituents.

Mexico Drug Cartel Tunnels into US

Featheriver — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:49:57 +0000

Remember all the controversy a few months back about building a fence along the US border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants? Some $2.4 billion has been spent since 2005 on a still-unfinished project to erect more than 600 miles of new fence along the US-Mexico border – a finding that is being met with surprise, anger, and consternation by immigrant groups and at least some border residents. The entire length of the Mexico-United States border is 1952 miles long. [Border Fence Project]

Last September the [Christian Science Monitor] reported that “$6.5 billion will be needed to maintain the new fencing over the next 20 years. So far, it has been breached 3,363 times, requiring $1,300 for the average repair.”

The Anderson Cooper video demonstrates that the border fence does not or will not work. The cost of building and maintaining the fence is exorbitant. Those billions of dollars can be put to better use. Health care reform certainly comes to mind. If you add in the billions of dollars spent, and still being spent in the war on Iraq, was a waste of money and lives. The cost of the war in Afghanistan is questionable as well. The United States has, during my lifetime alone, spent trillions of dollars in war. My lifetime experience includes World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The United States, as a nation, seems enamored with war. Only in World War II were we attacked by another country—Japan. We were not attacked by the countries of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

That tunnel under the border fence with Anderson Cooper was located at Otay Mesa which is at Tijuana. The tunnel would have permitted a flow of illegal immigrants and narcotics into the United States from Mexico.

Last spring President Barack Obama’s budget blueprint canceled plans to extend the border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border beyond the 670 miles already completed or planned, symbolically breaking with a much-heralded approach to border security advocated by President George W. Bush. [Dallas Morning News] That should end the waste of money for the ineffective border fence project.

The US-Mexico border will re-emerge again as soon as Congress can get back to it from their arguing over health care reform. The question about security of the border will center around illegal immigration and Mexican drug cartel’s entry into the United States. [Politico]

It may well be that the security of the United States is in more danger from the drug cartels than either illegal immigration, terrorists or Al Qaida in Afghanistan/Pakistan. You might want to add citizens of the United States who are addicted to drugs and buy them from the drug cartels as threats to national security.

CNN’s Michael Ware also has a video that takes you “to perhaps the deadliest city on earth (Juarez); 2,400 murders this year alone right across the border from El Paso, Texas and the violence is spilling over into America.”

In Juarez, 1,600 people died from drug-related violence last year. This year, the total’s already well over 2,000. And today’s total is already at 12, reports Ware. Mexico is in a mess.

“The (Mexican) people fear not just the cartels, but they watch the army and the police stand by as others are being killed. They know that many of the police are corrupt, that the military’s doing nothing,” said Ware. [CNN]

The Mexican drug cartels are establishing connections into the US Military. [KHOU-Houston]

“Authorities in California gathered intelligence showing the cartels are corrupting American politicians to gain a foothold in the Southwestern United States.” [Las Cruces Sun-News]

Cartels send representatives to U.S. communities to buy legitimate businesses, such as strip malls, restaurants, auto dealerships and used tire shops. Then, they invite local politicians and police to receive free meals and discounts, until they can develop relationships with influential people.

“They could give an entire city council a million dollars, and fire police chiefs, city managers, city attorneys, and anyone else who opposes them,” [Richard Valdemar, 33 year veteran Los Angeles Sheriff's Department] said. “They got local laws changed so they could run nightclubs, liquor stores and other businesses without interference. They went after cities’ towing contracts and other types of contracts.”

Although the true source of the money is hidden, he said the cartels contribute cash to the election campaigns of politicians, and finance negative campaigns against their rivals.

The Carrillo Fuentes organization in El Paso had its own bank in El Paso, parked its jets at city airport hangars and owned commercial properties across the county, drug investigators said.

I expect we’ll hear more and more about Mexican drug cartel activity in the United States, perhaps even here in Nye County, Nevada.

Broke, blind and trying to survive

Featheriver — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:22:14 +0000

The following story appeared in the St. Petersburg Times:

Monique Zimmerman-Stein and her husband, Gary Stein, have Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance through Stein’s job at the Hillsborough County Health Department. They pay $90 a week for coverage. But the insurance isn’t nearly enough.

Monique tries to picture what her girls must look like now that they’re 10 and 13. She hasn’t been able to see their faces in two years. Her days are long and dark and quiet

“I know I won’t ever see again. I’m not even asking for that,” Zimmerman-Stein said. “I just don’t think we should have to deal with constantly being harassed.”

Monique is 48. She and her two youngest daughters have Stickler’s syndrome [Wikipedia], a rare genetic disorder that causes joints to dissolve and retinas to detach. Monique lost her right eye at 16 and now sees only enough light through her left eye to tell night from day. She and her children are constantly in and out of doctors’ offices.

Aliyah, 10, almost died at birth and needed a tracheotomy for six years. Dava, 13, has arthritis in her spine and lost the sight in her left eye.

Insurance has been invaluable, said Gary Stein, 52. But it covers only 80 percent of most bills. The family is left to foot the balance.

The coverage would be adequate if they had only minor medical concerns, but their conditions require expensive tests, treatments and medications. In the last decade, they have racked up a half-million dollars in bills not covered by insurance.

They took out a second mortgage on their house (they later lost it to foreclosure and now rent). They sold furniture and cashed in life insurance, got their creditors to forgive some debt. Monique’s brother gave them $50,000, all he could afford.

Next to the sofa, a canvas bag from Disney World bulges with unopened statements from Florida Pediatrics, Tampa Bay Emergency Physicians, the Mayo Clinic. On the envelopes, red letters scream, “Delinquency Notice” and “Past due.”

They still owe at least $20,000, maybe 10 times that much, in medical bills. They don’t really know. Stein stopped opening the envelopes months ago.

In his Sept. 9 address to Congress, President Barack Obama urged lawmakers to set a limit on the amount of money anyone would have to pay out of pocket for health care. Patients would have a lifetime maximum they were responsible for, the way many insurance companies have a limit on what they will cover.

“In the United States of America,” Obama said, “no one should go broke because they get sick.”

But for Monique and her family, going broke isn’t the worst of it.

Recently, She made a decision.

She will no longer get treatment to preserve that last slice of light. The injections that might help cost $380 after insurance, and she needs one every six weeks. She could be spending that money on her daughters’ care.

If forgoing treatment might help them see, she said, “That’s a choice any mom would make.”

No one should have to make such sacrifices, said her husband. He hopes the new health plan will include a public option and won’t exclude people with pre-existing conditions — like his wife and daughters.

At least, he said, the government needs to cap out-of-pocket medical expenses.

Stein brings home $1,500 every two weeks, half of which is supposed to cover the rent. But most goes to doctor visits for his daughters.

The girls’ school clothes came from Goodwill this year. Zimmerman-Stein borrowed money to buy them backpacks.

Things are so tight, she and her husband fight over every expenditure: How can we keep paying for cat food? How dare someone let a lemon rot in the refrigerator!

For the first time, after 28 years of marriage, they need counseling.

But they can’t afford the co-pay.

Every afternoon about 4, Monique feels her way to the front door. She wishes she could meet her daughters at the bus stop, like other moms. But even with her red-tipped cane, she’s afraid to walk there alone. What if she missed a curb or embarrassed them?

So she stands in silence on the porch, listening for their footfalls, anticipating their laughter. She asks her girls about school, friends and homework, and about what they want to help her make for dinner.

She doesn’t ask about the mail anymore. She knows they bring it in and drop stacks of bills into the Disney bag so their dad doesn’t have to see them. She knows they hear mom and dad fighting, see mom crying.

One day last week, Monique’s face was splotchy when her daughters got home.

Her phone hadn’t stopped ringing all day.

Dava, who’s in seventh grade, dropped her backpack and led her mom to a chair. She rubbed her mom’s shoulders and promised, “It’s going to be okay,” but Monique couldn’t imagine how.

The St. Petersburg Times story found its way to the Huffington Post. A fundraiser ensued spurred by Huffington Post readers. Over 700 people donated $20,000 in less than 24 hours for the Stein family.

The Stein story illustrates the problem addressed in the health care/insurance reform effort and the need for a single-payer public option. Why the members of Congress that refuse to consider the single-payer option perplexes me. To me it appears they have accepted so much money from the health insurance industry they cannot, now, find a way to get control of the health care system out from under the health insurance industry. Plus, some of them feel, both Democrats and Republicans, their constituents back in their states will kick them out of office at their next election.

But what is right is right. The federal government has spent billions of dollars to bail out banks, car makers, and the like. But what about all those people that find themselves trapped in the same dilemma as the Steins. The Steins have no option. Except the generosity of other people.

Ensign support deserting him

Featheriver — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:44:27 +0000

Campaign contributors, current and former staffers and even lobbyists may be re-considering their ties to a man who once served as the GOP’s primary fund-raiser in the Senate.

At least three high-profile staffers have left Ensign’s orbit after the news broke of his affair with Cynthia Hampton. This includes the departure of ex-chief of staff John Lopez, ex-communications director Tory Mazzola and Mike Slanker, who worked with Ensign as the political director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, which Ensign chaired.

OpenSecrets has a long dissertation about Ensign’s money contributors which is well worth reading, particularly if you live in Nevada. [Source: OpenSecrets]

Ensign: In a new bind re Hampton affair

Featheriver — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:58:33 +0000

Early last year, Senator John Ensign contacted a small circle of political and corporate supporters back home in Nevada — a casino designer, an airline executive, the head of a utility and several political consultants — seeking work for a close friend and top Washington aide, Douglas Hampton.

“He’s a competent guy, and he’s looking to come back to Nevada. Do you know of anything?” one patron recalled Mr. Ensign asking.

Reports the New York Times.

Photo: Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

The job pitch left out one salient fact: the senator was having an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia. Ensign was looking for a way to get Doug Hampton out of Washington D.C.

Ensign told Michael Slanker that Mrs. Hampton was ill and Doug Hampton was weary of flying back and forth between Washington and Las Vegas; that Hampton would be returning to Nevada. None of that was true. Ensign was enlisting Slanker’s help in finding Doug Hampton a job in Las Vegas.

Slanker suggested Hampton could revive “Ensign Inc.,” where Slanker had served as Ensign’s top fund-raiser and political consultant. The company Mr. Slanker and his wife had formed to help run these campaigns, November Inc., had become dormant after the couple moved to Washington to help Mr. Ensign run the Republican committee in 2007.

Mr. Slanker said he proposed that the firm could be revived, giving Mr. Hampton a well-known base in Nevada political circles to start a small government affairs practice. “That afternoon, the senator and Mr. Slanker met with Mr. Hampton.”

“Whatever clients you can get — you can eat what you kill,” Mr. Slanker recalled telling Mr. Hampton of the deal.

Ensign agreed to help line up three or four clients who would pay Mr. Hampton enough to match or surpass his $144,000 Senate salary as an administrative assistant, Mr. Hampton said.

Senator Ensign lined up several donors as Hampton’s lobbying clients. Ensign and his staff then repeatedly intervened on the companies’ behalf with federal agencies, often after urging from Mr. Hampton. Hampton was lobbying the Senator though federal criminal laws prohibited him from doing so, and Ensign knew it, but they decided to ignore the law.

…trying to clean up the mess from the illicit relationship and distance himself from the Hamptons, he entangled political supporters, staff members and Senate colleagues, some of whom say they now feel he betrayed them.

And Ensign, it is reported, helped those clients of Hampton. He called the secretary of transportation last year to plead the case for a Nevada airline, Allegiant Air, which was under investigation for allegedly overcharging for tickets. Ensign arranged for Mr. Hampton and his clients to meet the new transportation secretary in a successful effort to resolve a dispute with a foreign competitor.

NV Energy, the largest power company in Nevada, had a problem in the summer of 2008. The utility had been waiting more than a year for the Interior Department to finish an environmental assessment of a proposed $5 billion coal-burning plant.

The company figured that if Mr. Bush left office without the environmental report’s being approved, the entire project could be stalled indefinitely. Nevada Democrats, including Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, had spoken out against the plan.

Weeks earlier, Mr. Ensign had contacted Michael Yakira, the chief executive of NV Energy, and inquired about work for Mr. Hampton, the company acknowledged in an e-mail message. The company and its executives were reliable supporters of the senator, contributing more than $50,000 to his political causes over the previous five years. After Mr. Yakira met with Mr. Hampton, the company hired him, through November Inc., to do “lobbying coordination” of federal officials, according to a copy of the contract.

…the senator also spoke with other Nevada power brokers, including Maurice J. Gallagher Jr., the chief executive of Allegiant Air, the Las Vegas-based discount airline; Bob Andrews, a financial industry executive; Sig Rogich, a prominent Republican consultant; and Paul Steelman, a casino architect and developer. In the conversations, Mr. Ensign did not specify what type of work Mr. Hampton might perform, but the executives he contacted said he had made it clear that Mr. Hampton would be well suited for consulting that drew on his Senate experience.

But Hampton was irritated because Ensign had not provided him with enough clients to lobby for. Hampton e-mailed Ensign:

“You have not retained three clients for me as promised, and your poor choices have led to a deep hurt and financial impact to my family,” Mr. Hampton wrote the senator in an e-mail message in July 2008. “At your request and your design, I left your organization to save your reputation and career, and mine has been ruined.”

That lead, ultimately, to Ensign’s parents paying Mr. and Mrs. Hampton and two of their children $96,000 which the Senator maintains was just a gift to the Hamptons.

Senator Ensign voted against public option

Featheriver — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:17:03 +0000

Senator Ensign of Nevada is no friend of Nevadans. He posted the following on his website:

Photo from the Las Vegas Sun: Senate Finance Committee members Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., left, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., talk Tuesday on Capitol Hill before the committee’s debate on health care legislation. Ensign spoke at length about his opposition to a government-run insurance plan.

ENSIGN HELPS DEFEAT DEMOCRAT PUBLIC PLAN AMENDMENTS

Schumer and Rockefeller amendments would have included version of government takeover of health care in bill

Washington, D.C. – Senator John Ensign, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, today voted to defeat two amendments that would have attempted to include a version of a government-run plan in the healthcare reform bill.

“I strongly oppose a government takeover of our healthcare system in America and will continue to fight against Democrats’ attempts to include it in the bill,” Ensign said. “A government takeover could force private insurers out of the industry and could force hundreds of millions of Americans, against their will, into government-run health care. A public plan, with one signature from President Obama, could destroy our healthcare industry as we know it and turn every one of our healthcare decisions over to government bureaucrats.”

Because the federal government will act as a competitor, a regulator, and a funder, a government-run plan would ultimately force private insurers out of business. The Congressional Budget Office Director has testified that it would be “extremely difficult” to create “a system where a public plan could compete on a level playing field” against private coverage. The two amendments, offered by Democrat Senators Chuck Schumer and Jay Rockefeller, would have included a version of the public plan in the Senate healthcare bill.

Fact is the healthcare insurance industry IS the problem.

The Las Vegas Sun carried the following in today’s news coverage:

John Ensign: Public option would be popular, so let’s not do it

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. John Ensign delivered one of the more curious arguments against a government-run, public health care option during a long and lofty Senate committee debate Tuesday.

People might like it and use it.

Then it would become popular, and too big to fail.

And the government would have to support it.

“Does anyone really believe this Congress will let this government program go away if it has a constituency?” Ensign asked his colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee. “To have a large program like this, once it’s started, you’re never going to get rid of it.”

The public option would be a government-run health care alternative to the private insurance market. It’s intended to provide an option for those currently without health insurance, and, through competition, rein in rising insurance costs.

It has become perhaps the most contentious element in the proposed health care legislation — dividing not only Democrats and Republicans, but also Democrats and Democrats — and is the focus of those trying to defeat the health care bill.

Supporters argue the public option would force insurance companies to compete for all the new business that health care reform would create. The insurance companies stand to gain millions of new customers as both the House and Senate bills require Americans to carry health insurance, just as most states require automobile insurance. More than 30 million Americans are uninsured.

The uninsured could choose to buy the government-run plan or private insurance (and the poor would qualify for an expanded Medicaid program). Those who ignore the new law and go without insurance would face fines.

Tuesday provided a first major test of the public option during an hours-long debate in the Senate Finance Committee, which is the final congressional panel to consider the bill. Committee members were considering two amendments to add the public option.

Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the leading advocate of the public option, delivered an impassioned speech.

Ensign helped hold up the Republican side of the opposition, sometimes drawing on his experience as a veterinarian. For the most part, his argument reflected Republicans’ contention that the new option would be a step toward socialized health care — that the public option would put private insurers out of business.

“All of this is a slippery slope toward complete government-run health care, complete government-run takeover of our health care system,” Ensign said.

Ensign scoffed at the suggestion, proposed in the amendments, that the public option would operate autonomously, relying on premiums paid by customers rather than federal funding. Once the plan got up and running, Ensign said, it would create its own constituency, and Congress would be afraid to kill it off even if it needed federal funding to survive, he said.

“As Ronald Reagan said, ‘The best way to ensure a life is to become a government program,’ ” Ensign said.

“These government programs start and they grow and they grow and they grow and they grow,” he said. “Government was set up to do the things we need it to do, not the things we want it to do.”

The amendments failed. Public option supporters vow to continue fighting on the Senate floor.

Ensign might be right. Should it be adopted, the public option might become too big to fail. Polls show most Americans — 65 percent, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News survey — support a public option.

Lisa Mascaro can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at lisa.mascaro@lasvegassun.com.

What a reason to defeat the public option proposed by Senator Rockefeller! People might like it? It is pretty clear who Senator Ensign is representing – the health insurance industry.

Baucus-Grassley rake $ in from health industry

Featheriver — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:56:51 +0000

The Gang of Six, three Republican and three Democratic senators in the group, all of them members of the Senate Finance Committee, received an average of $74,600 from health industry lobbyists, according to The San Francisco’s Chronicle’s analysis of records through June.

That is about 25 percent more than the average of $59,632 in such donations that the gang’s other Senate colleagues raked in from lobbyists for the pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and nursing home industries, according to the analysis, which was based on records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, [Wikipedia] [VoteSmart] [OpenSecrets] the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee who is seen as key to influencing other conservatives, received the most this year – $223,600. Committee chair Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., [Wikipedia] [VoteSmart] [OpenSecrets] was second with $141,000.

Baucus’ $856 billion, 10-year bill, which is scheduled to be amended and voted on beginning Tuesday, has been criticized by liberals and conservatives across Capitol Hill.

Conservatives blasted the plan for increasing the tax burden on some Americans. The plan imposes a 35 percent excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans that cost more than $8,000 a year per person, or $21,000 a year per family.

Liberals dislike the Baucus plan because it does not allow consumers to choose a government-run insurance option, which could hold down costs by promoting competition with private insurers.

Baucus’ bill would allow cooperatives to sell insurance as a form of competition for private insurers, but Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf said co-ops “seem unlikely to establish a significant market presence in many areas of the country.”

Blue Dogs are getting their share too. They have received an average of $31,467 from health care lobbyists this year, more than the $27,385 average of other House members, according to federal figures compiled by The Chronicle.

Money talks. Here is how much Nevada’s Senators/Representives have taken from the health care sector. [Source: San Francisco Chronicle]

[Source: San Francisco Chronicle]