Do our elected deserve better healthcare than us?

UPDATE, Looks like we now know why


Six lobbyists per lawmaker enough on health care?
Posted: 01:09 PM ET
FROM CNN’s Jack Cafferty:

Want to know why they’re having trouble getting health care reform passed in Washington? Consider this: There are six…. count ‘em — six, lobbyists for each of the 535 members of Congress.

This translates to 3,300 lobbyists working on health care — or three times the number who lobby on defense. These groups reportedly spent more than $263 million on lobbying during the first six months of this year — with drug makers alone spending more than $134 million.

One expert tells Bloomberg news: “The sheer quantity of money that’s sloshed around Washington is drowning out the voices of citizens and the groups that speak up for them.”

And let’s talk about that money for a minute. According to The Center for Responsive Politics, health-related companies gave almost $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008.


It's really amazing the same people saying government healthcare is no good, are also the same people thinking private healthcare is not good enough for them. Why do you think that is? Could you imagine if we told them that they have to give their's up and live like the rest of us?
Six lobbyists per lawmaker enough on health care

GOPers Decrying "Socialized Medicine" Go To Govt. Hospital For Surgeries



By The Huffington Post News Team, Huffington Post
Republicans in Congress have raised the specter of a bloated, "socialized," bureaucrat-run nightmare of a health care system as a means of undermining the White House's effort at a systematic overhaul. And yet, as Democratic sources are now pointing out, when medical crisis hit close to home, many of these same officials turned to a government-run hospital for their own intensive care and difficult surgeries.

Take, for instance, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who warned that "a government takeover of health care" would "take away the care that people already have [and] are perfectly satisfied with." In its place, the senator said, would be "a system in which care and treatment will be either delayed or denied."

That was July 2009. In February 2003, McConnell actually went to one of those government-run institutions (where treatment is, apparently, "either delayed or denied") for a procedure of his own. The Kentucky Republican traveled to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to have an elective coronary artery bypass surgery after it had been revealed that he had arterial blockages.

Also known as Bethesda Naval Hospital, the National Naval Medical Center is the premier branch of the United States Navy's system of medical centers -- as in, the government runs it. It's also the place where elected officials of all ideological stripes and political branches often go get surgery performed. Indeed, members of Congress pay an annual fee for the privilege of getting treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital or, for that matter, Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It is, as longtime Democrat Martin Frost wrote for Politico, "like belonging to an HMO." Only, in these cases, the surgery is conducted at a public facility.
read more here
GOPers Decrying Socialized Medicine