crooksandliars.com
Well, frumps, in a kinder, gentler (less informed) time Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson might have gotten away with a sharp rebuke for bad manners but would still be able to ride his “high horse” into the sunset. BUT – as happens so often in this crazy little 21st century, especially to the GOP – there are “vigilante fact checkers” out there, who are only too happy to call you out if you turn out to be an opportunistic hypocrite.
And so it is that we learned, yesterday, that Joe Wilson, who was so righteously enflamed over the notion that illegal immigrants might benefit from the current healthcare reform bill, broke with the rules of Congressional decorum and protocol and yelled out that the President was a liar. Well, as we used to say in the old neighborhood “takes one to know one.”
Here’s the skinny on that from OpenCongress.org:
On Wednesday night, Rep. Joe Wilson [R, SC-2], shouted “You lie!” at President Obama when he said that the healthcare bill would not cover illegal immigrants. “The supporters of the government takeover of healthcare and liberals who want to give healthcare to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan,” Wilson said the next day in a campaign fundraising video.
However, in 2003, Wilson voted to provide federal funds for illegal immigrants’ healthcare. The vote came on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA), which contained Sec. 1011 authorizing $250,000 annually between 2003 and 2008 for government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. The program has been extended through 2009 and there is currently a bipartisan bill in Congress to make it permanent.
It’s highly unlikely that Rep. Wilson merely forgot about the MMA or that, over time, he lost his original soft-heartedness for illegal immigrants. This particular bill had one of the most epically contentious and scandalous histories in recent legislative memory.
“Reader’s Digest Version”
According to Wikipedia:
The bill was debated and negotiated for nearly six years in Congress, and finally passed amid unusual circumstances. Several times in the legislative process the bill had appeared to have failed, but each time was saved when a couple of Congressmen and Senators switched positions on the bill.
The bill was finally introduced in the House of Representatives early on June 25, 2003 as H.R. 1, sponsored by Speaker Dennis Hastert. All that day and the next the bill was debated, and it was apparent that the bill would be very divisive. In the early morning of June 27, a floor vote was taken. After the initial electronic vote, the count stood at 214 yeas, 218 nays.
Three Republican representatives then changed their votes. One opponent of the bill, Ernest J. Istook, Jr. (R-OK-5), changed his vote to “present” upon being told that C.W. Bill Young (R-FL-10), who was absent due to a death in the family, would have voted “aye” if he had been present. Next, Republicans Butch Otter (ID-1) and Jo Ann Emerson (MO-8) switched their vote to “aye” under pressure from the party leadership. The bill passed by one vote, 216-215.
On June 26, the Senate passed its version of the bill, 76-21. The bills were unified in conference, and on November 21, the bill came back to the House for approval.
The bill came to a vote at 3 a.m. on November 22. After 45 minutes, the bill was losing, 219-215, with David Wu (D-OR-1) not voting. Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay sought to convince some of dissenting Republicans to switch their votes, as they had in June. Istook, who had always been a wavering vote, consented quickly, producing a 218-216 tally. In a highly unusual move, the House leadership held the vote open for hours as they sought two more votes. Then-Representative Nick Smith (R-MI) claimed he was offered campaign funds for his son, who was running to replace him, in return for a change in his vote from “nay” to “yea.” After controversy ensued, Smith clarified no explicit offer of campaign funds was made, but that that he was offered “substantial and aggressive campaign support” which he had assumed included financial support.[14]
About 5:50 a.m., convinced Otter and Trent Franks (AZ-2) to switch their votes. With passage assured, Wu voted yea as well, and Democrats Calvin M. Dooley (CA-20), Jim Marshall (GA-3) and David Scott (GA-13) changed their votes to the affirmative. But Brad Miller (D-NC-13), and then, Republican John Culberson (TX-7), reversed their votes from “yea” to “nay”. The bill passed 220-215.
The Democrats cried foul, and Bill Thomas, the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means committee, challenged the result in a gesture to satisfy the concerns of the minority. He subsequently voted to table his own challenge; the tally to table was 210 ayes, 193 noes.
The Senate’s consideration of the conference report was somewhat less heated, as cloture on it was invoked by a vote of 70-29.[15] However, a budget point of order raised by Tom Daschle, and voted on. As 60 votes were necessary to override it, the challenge was actually considered to have a credible chance of passing.
For several minutes, the vote total was stuck at 58-39, until Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Trent Lott (R-MS), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) voted in quick succession in favour to pass the vote 61-39.[16] The bill itself was finally passed 54-44 on November 25, 2003, and was signed into law by the President on December 8.[17]
Now, if you’re anything like me, at that point in the story, you might be scratching your head and wondering why all of this sudden GOP fervor for reforming that old socialistic bugaboo, Medicare? If that’s the case, I have two words for you: Pharmaceutical Lobby.
According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, congressmen are outnumbered two to one by lobbyists for an industry that spends roughly $100 million a year in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses to protect its profits.
Back in 2003, just as in the current healthcare reform debate, the pharmaceutical industry recognized that the Medicare Modernization Act could be a perfect vehicle to ensure that the Medicare Program, would never be able to negotiate for volume price discounts on drugs.
Big Pharma was getting very worried about this because everywhere else in the world, where a national healthcare program was in place, that was exactly what had happened. The Medicare Program in the good old US of A was the only government program left in the world that was still paying top dollar for drugs and the Pharma Industry very much wanted to keep it that way. And that’s why Americans, who are able, go to Canada and Mexico to get affordable prescription drugs.
Even within the US, the government owned and operated Veteran’s Administration healthcare system pays a fraction of what Medicare does for the very same drugs.
In 2007, CBS’s Sixty Minutes did an excellent investigative piece on all of the ugliness that transpired to make sure that American seniors would continue to pay top dollar for the prescription drugs that are putting them in the poorhouse. I urge all of you to follow this link and read every word of 60 Minute’s report not so much so that we can cry over spilt milk but because it is critically important for understanding the behind the scenes dynamic of the current healthcare reform “war.” Here’s a snippet of that report:
The unorthodox roll call on one of the most expensive bills ever placed before the House of Representatives began in the middle of the night, long after most people in Washington had switched off C-SPAN and gone to sleep.
The only witnesses were congressional staffers, hundreds of lobbyists, and U.S. representatives, like Dan Burton, R-Ind., and Walter Jones, R-N.C.
“The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill,” says Jones. “The bill was over 1,000 pages. And it got to the members of the House that morning, and we voted for it at about 3 a.m. in the morning,” remembers Jones.
Why did the vote finally take place at 3 a.m.?
“Well, I think a lot of the shenanigans that were going on that night, they didn’t want on national television in primetime,” according to Burton.
“I’ve been in politics for 22 years,” says Jones, “and it was the ugliest night I have ever seen in 22 years.”
The legislation was the cornerstone of Republican’s domestic agenda and would extend limited prescription drugs coverage under Medicare to 41 million Americans, including 13 million who had never been covered before.
When Sixty Minutes Steve Krofft asked Ron Pollack, the Executive Director of FamiliesUSA, why he though drug companies cared so very much about this particular bill, this was Pollack’s answer:
It prohibited Medicare and the federal government from using its vast purchasing power to negotiate lower prices directly from the drug companies.
“The key goal was to make sure there’d be no interference in the drug companies’ abilities to charge high prices and to continue to increase those prices,” says Pollack.
“They were the ones who wanted to make sure Medicare could charge high prices and to continue to increase those prices,” he says.
The drug industry says that competition among private insurance plans that service the Medicare program help keep prices low. But Families USA reported in a January study that Medicare patients are being charged nearly 60 percent more for the top 20 drugs than veterans pay under a program run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
For example, Lipitor, a popular cholesterol drug, the cheapest Medicare price is $785 for a year’s supply — 50 percent more than the VA’s price of $520.
“Medicare could do the same thing,” he says, “but Medicare is prohibited from doing that as a result of this new Medicare legislation.”
What Price Glory?
One other important point about the parallel between what happened to get the MMA passed and what is currently happening on our own healthcare reform debate has to do with the price tag. We have all heard the tea baggers shrieking about the fact that healthcare reform will destroy the economy, add to the deficit, blahblahblah . . .
Steve Krofft interviewed Rep. Dan Burton about the pricetag on the MMA bill and here’s how the Righteous Wing handled just that issue on their own pet project:
Before the vote, Congress was told the program would cost a whopping $395 billion over the first 10 years. In fact, Medicare officials already knew it was going to cost a lot more.
Burton said he and others were misled. “Within two weeks after the bill was passed, everybody knew it was gonna cost well over $500 billion,” he says. “And many members of the Congress [who] had voted for it said, ‘I would never have voted for it had I known that.’ “
Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster later told Congress that he revised the cost estimate to $534 billion before the vote, but was told to withhold the new numbers if he wanted to keep his job.
During a Congressional hearing, Foster stated: “It struck me there was a political basis for making that decision. I considered that inappropriate and, in fact, unethical.”
Foster said the person who told him to withhold Congress from getting the revised estimates was Medicare boss Tom Scully.
Scully was the administration’s lead negotiator on the prescription drug bill, and at the time was also negotiating a job for himself with a high-powered Washington law firm, where he became a lobbyist with the pharmaceutical industry.
It is but one example of the incestuous relationship between Congress and the industry, and just one of the reasons the pharmaceutical lobby almost never loses a political battle that affects its bottom line.
Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, who helped push the prescription drug bill through the House, didn’t disagree when Krofft interviewed him:.
Krofft: Has the bill been good for the drug industry?
Tauzin: “It’s been good for the patients whom the drug industry represents. In terms of profits — [for the drug companies] and volumes, yes.”
Kroft: “Your old friend, John Dingell, says that of the 1,500 bills over the last eight years dealing with pharmaceutical issues, the drug companies almost, without exception, have gotten what they wanted.”
Tauzin: “Yeah … I would think he’s correct. They’ve done fairly well,” replies Tauzin.
Why has this lobby been so successful? The former congressman says he believes it’s because they stood for the right things.
If Tauzin sounds a lot like a lobbyist for the drug industry, that’s because now he is.
Technorati Tags: right wing, Rep. Joe Wilson, lobbying, pharmaceutical lobby, healthcare reform, illegal immigrants, health care costs, 2003 Medicare Modernization Act
