Lobbyists are pouring money into D.C. on health care reform.
The fact is these massive funds flooding D.C. to buy our Government are ill gotten profits from sick people. It's all a huge effort to maintain the status quo, keep their for profit industry intact and to block any assemblance to single payer universal health care reform.
Below is a table of the funds dumped on D.C. in Q1, 2009. If you have more numbers, please consider leaving them in a comment with a reference and it will be added to the tally.
| Lobbyist | Amount |
|---|---|
| American Hospital Association | $18.4M |
| America's Health Insurance Plans | $6.4M |
| Pfizer | $6.1M |
| American Medical Association | $4.4M |
| Minnetonka | $1.5M |
| WellPoint | $1.2M |
| Metlife | $1.2M |
| Humana | $0.37M |
| Aetna | $0.81M |
| Advanced Medical Technology | $0.36M |
References
1. Fox News
2. Insurance networking
3. Wall Street Journal
4. Sunlight Foundation
Update: This Huffington Post blog, The Health Insurance Mafia Deserves a Good Screwing, lists some health care industry CEO paychecks:
- Ron Williams - Aetna - Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
- H. Edward Hanway - CIGNA - Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
- Angela Braly - WellPoint - Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
- Dale Wolf - Coventry Health Care - Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
- Michael Neidorff - Centene - Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
- James Carlson - AMERIGROUP - Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
- Michael McCallister - Humana - Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
- Jay Gellert - Health Net - Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
- Richard Barasch - Universal American - Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
- Stephen Hemsley - UnitedHealth Group - Total Compensation: $3,241,042.
I am fu*king pissed.
We spend over $2 trillion on 2 wars and there is little outrage. We try to help our own people with some form of health care reform. People are howling from the roof tops.
WTF? I swear a nation that refuses to help its own is doomed to failure.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
all PR/marketing/sales
The huge money, of course made from sick people, is running "concerned citizen" ads on TV like Viagra screaming about how "the government is going to stop you from seeing a Doctor" and so on.
People are silly they do not check out the background of who is running these ads but they don't.
So, they get all of these people to call, not realizing the details.
On the "government" side, because the government has been so busy screwing over the American people, it's not surprise that any sort of government intrusion into people's lives gets so much outrage "stimulus".