A former aide to Senator Max Baucus and current acting-Director at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Jonathan Blum, has complied with a request by his former boss to investigate insurance companies. President Obama appointed Jonathan Blum and it appears he is faithfully silencing opposition to the Baucus efforts to produce a Senate version of the failing House healthcare reform package.
The investigation resulted in a letter being sent to Humana and, say sources on Capitol Hill, other health insurers who have a fiduciary relationship with CMS that imposes an industry-wide “gag order” ordering a halt to any additional mailings and effectively prevents companies from communicating with their customers about the impact of any pending healthcare reform legislation.
Efforts to quash transparency and accountability are not lost on Democrats in Congress.
Obama and the Democrats have not, however, governed as they campaigned. Openness and transparency exist in theory and talking points, not in practice.
We saw another example Wednesday afternoon, as Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee almost unanimously voted to defeat an amendment offered by retiring G.O.P. Kentucky Republican Sen. Jim Bunning to require that the exact language of any health care legislation—and the bill’s cost estimate—be placed on the committee’s website seventy-two hours before a final vote in committee.
What’s the big deal you ask? The House version of healthcare reform is a disaster. Congress had thought they could go to the August recess to gain support for government-run healthcare in their home districts.
What they found was something quite different. Unlike many in Congress, the folks who turned out for the these events had actually read the bill—in this case H.R. 3200, the healthcare reform package pushed forward by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., and her leadership team. And, having read the bill, the critics of Obamacare were able to slice through the arguments in favor of it like a chain saw slicing through a barrel of fish.
Democrats in the United States Senate, however, are apparently not as naïve as their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol. They are pushing ahead with reform legislation fully intent on keeping it away from the prying eyes of the American people, if that’s what it takes.
If you haven’t read the version of America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 currently available and the Chairman’s mark, etc., a subsequent post on this blog will address that topic. And if you believe that health ‘insurance’ reform in Congress will be a good thing you qualify as ’sheeple’. There is nothing about this episode in government-run reform that will be any better than the failures in the past…. those rejected or those that became law.
Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Public Affairs, Money Matters, Health, wordpress, Politics, Democrats, liberal, conspiracy, Kennedy, disclosure, ethics, obama, Medicare, Congress, Legislation, Sen Max Baucus.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
