Thank you John Baer. In today's column, the estimable Mr. Baer comes oh so close to saying what I will so here:
State legislators have been bought off by the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies and it's costing us $100 million.
Pass the rage-a-hol.
Let me 'splain, using Baer's column:
At issue is a Rendell administration plan allowing the Welfare Department to buy prescription drugs for a million folks on medical assistance, including about 400,000 in Philly.
Currently, the drug benefit is run by multiple managed-care organizations, you know, the health insurance industry, and, of course, the drug companies.
They want to keep it that way.
Those with lots of loot don't easily give it up.
Never mind that the state can get federal rebates (not available through managed care) allowing it to buy drugs for 30 percent less, hence an estimated savings of $95 million to $100 million per year.
Never mind that Welfare already does this for another 800,000 medical-assistance recipients not under managed care, and says it cuts costs doing so.
And never mind that 20 other states, including neighbors Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and New York have already made the switch.
So, if I could sit down with every voting-age person in Pennsylvania and just give them the facts, I wonder if it would make a difference.
The facts, as Colbert is fond of saying, have a well known liberal bias. In this case - as is the case with most issues of the Pennsylvania state legislature - the facts have an obvious anti-legislator bias.
Baer dug up some figures to illustrate how much money some major drug companies have pumped into politics. Unfortunately, you and I, as taxpayers, don't engage in similar lobbying efforts to buy off our elected representatives and get them to... well... look out for us. All we have is our vote, which apparently isn't worth as much as a bucket of spit.
This is a story that deserves some more investigation. One commenter to the story makes a pretty simple request:
It would be interesting to find out how many of the Legislators who are against this get political contributions from the Managed Care companies.
Exactly. Hopefully, after reading Baer's column, someone is doing the digging.