The following are examples of special last minute provisions added in to the Senate health-care bill to get 60 votes.
Connecticut: $100 million for the University of Connecticut medical center.
Florida: Grandfather clause that exempts Florida residents from losing Medicare Advantage benefits. Cost $3billion-$5billion dollars.
Louisiana: $300 million in Medical subsidies to “certain states recovering from a medical disaster” (only Louisiana).
Massachusetts, Vermont: $500 million and $600 million, respectively, in higher Medicaid reimbursements.
Michigan: Exemption from the insurance fee for Michigan Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Michigan, Connecticut: Higher reimbursements for certain hospitals under Medicare.
Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming: Higher Medicare payments to “frontier” hospitals and doctors.
Montana: Medicare coverage for individuals exposed to environmental health hazards in or around Libby MT., an asbestos superfund site.
Nebraska: Exemption from the insurance fee for Nebraska Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Mutual of Omaha; and 100% federal payment for new Medicare coverage, at a cost of $100 million dollars
Vermont: $10 million for community health-care centers.
(The source for these figures is the Senate Finance Committee)
Harry (the wheeler dealer) Reid took these slime ball senators in the back room and bought their votes for the above amounts to get the necessary 60 votes needed to ram this piece of garbage through above the objections of the American people who have clearly stated they don’t want this.
Just to give one an idea of how sleazy and smelly this bit of chicanery is, 10 State Attorneys General are now looking into the legality and/or the constitutionality of this case of out and out bribery.
Reid you really are a sleazy bum.
I have written before about the tactics used by these parasitic weasels of misdirection. While the country is up in arms about this health-care garbage, the military is quietly going forward with court martial proceedings against three Navy Seals for of all things doing the very job our government trained them to do.
They captured the guy who was responsible for murdering four civilian contract workers and then hanging their bodies from a bridge.
The terrorist claims one of the seals punched him and gave him a fat lip (too bad they didn’t perform an orchiectomy on him), and for this these honorable young men face trial. What kind of a message does this send to the young men following behind them about what to expect if they enlist.
A British Captain by the name of John Tonkin was once quoted as saying “I have always felt that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized, it can’t!”
Any Officer who sits on that court should resign his commission.
