Obama's Daschle Plan for Health Insurance "Reform" in the Stimulus Bill The Result of Bribes Paid To Daschle by Health Care Industry

Following up on my previous post, this just in from POLITICO. Dems who won't do an ostrich routine need to slap themselves and read this ... NOW:

Daschle made nearly $5.3 million in the last two years, records released Friday show, including $220,000 he received for giving speeches, many of them to outfits that stand to gain or lose millions of dollars from the work he would do once confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services.

For instance, the Health Industry Distributors Association plunked down $14,000 to land the former Senate Democratic leader in March 2008. The association, which represents medical products distributors, boasts on its website that Daschle met with it after he was nominated to discuss “the impact an Obama administration will have on the industry.”

This week, the group began openly lobbying him, sending him a letter urging him to rescind a rule requiring competitive bidding of Medicare contracts.

Another organization, America’s Health Insurance Plans, paid $20,000 for a Daschle speaking appearance in February 2007. It represents health insurance companies, which under Obama’s plan would be barred from denying coverage on the basis of health or age.

There was a $12,000 talk to GE Healthcare in August, a $20,000 lecture in January to Premier, Inc., a health care consulting firm, and a pair of $18,000 speeches this year to different hospital systems, among other paid appearances before health care groups.

The speaking fees were detailed in a financial disclosure statement released Friday, which showed that Daschle pulled down a total of more than $500,000 from the speaking circuit in the last two years, and $5.3 million in overall income.

And furthermore, from nextGov:

Daschle received speaking fees in 2008 from Premier Inc., which collects and analyzes clinical and financial data for hospitals, and America's Health Insurance Plans, an association that represents 1,300 health insurers, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Premier and America's Health Insurance Plans belong to the Confidentiality Coalition, which sent a letter in December to Senate and House leadership opposing plans to include in the economic stimulus bill provisions that would protect the privacy of patients. The bill includes $20 billion for promoting transforming American's paper health records to electronic form to reduce costs and improve health care.

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Daschle and Obama Create the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology to Curtail Costs by Depriving Americans of Needed Care

Excuse me, my Dem dears, but why isn't our camera-loving, speechy Obama crowing about this as one of his triumphs? Read on and find out.

How best to control the absurd costs of health care in America? According to the disgraced Daschle and our new Messiah, President Obama, you penalize the consumers while doing little or nothing to prevent the medical mega-corps from continuing to pad the nation's indefensible medical bills with never-ending demands for more profit.

Listen up, you Dems who support the Messiah, this is all in black and white. The government will function like a corrupt HMO, using bureaucrats to make rules that will deny specific treatments not only for specific age groups, but potentially everyone, and thus relieve medical professionals from the need to use their experience and brains. Medicare will also take a big hit as the elderly will suffer terribly from this. Medications will suddenly not be covered. Important innovations in Alzheimer's disease, e.g., will be denied. You think I'm joking?

We will all suffer from this. Yes, CHANGE is coming, and Obama will make sure of it.

Also, more windfall profits for insurance companies. Why? Because they won't have to pay off on billions worth of treatments suddenly deemed inappropriate or unsuitable by the Washington bureaucracy, they will get access to a uniform medical database that will make it easier for them to deny claims and coverage based on "pre-existing" conditions, and as a bonus, they won't have to lower their rates or make it easier for the uninsured to acquire needed insurance.

Health care costs to the consumer will remain the same and we are assured the enshrinement of a well-defined two tier health care system: one for the rich, and the Daschle-Obama plan for everyone else. The "change" helps only the corporate supporters of Obama and Congress.

According to Betsy at Bloomberg.com:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.”

There was zero national debate on this. It was cleverly included with the stimulus package, disguised and kept quiet by Obama at the advice of Daschle.

True? Yes, it's true!

As a friend of mine would say, Shine Perishing Democracy!