If Mary Landrieu’s “Louisiana Purchase” made you mad, check out the laundry list (383 pages worth) of state provisions, aka pork, that some how made its way into the Senate Health Bill around midnight last night.
-Chris Dodd: This one’s my favorite. Although Chris Dodd doesn’t come right out and say that the money is for UConn, his provision says the $100 million is for:
“a health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services.” It must be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States “that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.”
that happens to be located in Mansfield, Ct…whose mascot is a huskie…whose basketball coach is Jim Calhoun…hmmm, may be too specific…
I’d love to see a Republican pick that $100 million off for a university in their state; but because of Dodd’s ultra-specific wording, only about a dozen qualify.
-Ben Nelson: The federal government will pick up the tab for the expansion of Medicaid benefits in Nebraska.
-Max Baucus: Medicare expansion in Libby, Montana
-Bill Nelson: Another Medicare expansion that will result in hundreds of thousands of Floridians being grand-fathered in.
Other goodies:
-Nebrasksa, Louisiana, Vermont, and Massachusetts will receive federal help with Medicaid.
-$10 billion, courtesy of Bernie Sanders, for community health centers.
Here’s how Mark Steyn summarized what’s going on:
You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t “border on immoral”: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.
These expansions of Medicare & Medicaid as well as the goodies I’ve mentioned will cost somewhere between $1-1.6 trillion, which will be paid for by raising taxes and cutting $500 billion out of Medicare right around the time our baby boomers turn 65. Great plan.
Less money + more patients = rationing