dollars and (makes) sense
as mentioned, we’re going to give you a view into key factors influencing the healthcare debate this week — we did this a a while back when the financial debaucle was in full swing. whether you are for or against health care reform, it’s important to know what influences our elected officials. a website called opensecrets.org, a non-partisan organization which follows the money in washington, researched the money spent by the healthcare industry as part of their humungous lobbying effort over the past year. you should know that of the $2.5B bones spent on lobbying in 2009 by the 13,426 registered lobbyists:
- $199,323,702 of it was spent by pharmaceuticals/health products companies
- $122,065,251 of it was spent by insurance companies
that, if i did the math right, is almost 13% of all lobbying dollars spent this year spent to influence healthcare decision-making in washington (you can bet a bunch more will be tallied in december). think that’s a drop in the bucket? consider that the much maligned defense industry spent about 4% of the total in the same period and crazy single issue “ists” (e.g., anti/pro-gun peeps) spent about 4% too (combined 1/3 less than the health care/pharma total) — that’s um 2/3rds of the total healthcare/drug/insurance spending.
and what did it get them?
- we can’t buy drugs from outlaw places like CANADA even though it would present significant cost savings
- the healthcare companies remain exempt from anti-trust laws which means they don’t have to compete.
conservative or liberal, this has got to make you think.
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