The War on Corporate Welfare
Each evening, after a day of hard work, involving the treatment of patients’ legitimate physical and psychosocial problems, I turn on the television, hoping to hear some sort of good news regarding our “financial cliff.” Instead, I am witness to a cockfight between two contestants, one, a left handed president, forced by his depraved lobbies to fight with his left hand tied behind his back and his right wing opponent, forced by his depraved lobbies to defend himself with his left hand. While Mr. Boehner demands huge spending cuts on what he calls “entitlements,” Mr. Obama, in the typical manner of an attorney who had never learned how to practice, fails to ask the Speaker “what,” exactly he means by “entitlements?” Does he mean the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare extended to the ravenous homeowners insurance industry in the form of “states of emergency” declared in various states every single year? You know, the policy payouts that the companies falsely promise that they can pay when they they obtain their bogus business licenses from the industry’s local corporate concubine, better known as the state’s “Insurance Commissioner.” Or, does he mean the Medicare insurance policy that seniors have already paid for two or three times over, you know, the money stolen by Mr. Boehner’s buddies in Congress to pay for their unfunded wars?
Despite Mr. Obama’s various successes, in the last four years, he has proven to be just as miserable a negotiator as he has a superb campaigner. Despite the constant carping by his jealous opponents, taking “to the road” is the only effective way for this president to accomplish anything meaningful in his handling of domestic issues. Candidate Obama was swept into office promising to clean up Medicare, only to run into the parasites in his own party, those licentious congressmen and senators subservient to the durable goods, oxygen companies and laboratory lobbies. While these lobbies had gradually been sucking Medicare dry for some twenty years in the form of tens of billions of dollars each year in gross overpayments (usually three to four times retail or “competitive” prices), greedy Republican lobbies have sought to even that amount of graft in a much shorter time. The President has suggested cutting approximately sixteen billion dollars per year in overpayments for drugs under Part D by introducing “some form” of competitive bargaining. Considering that the V.A. and the military pay an average of 40-50 % of the inflated Medicare prices, by my arithmetic, that means that Part D overspent at least thirty billion dollars last year alone and G-d knows how much this year !
It’s time to hit the road again, Mr. President. It’s time to actually take the real case to the people, to stop soiling your clothes under the constant barrage of threats by your own party’s apostates. Demand accountability from guilty Democratic lobbies and then tell the people to demand the same competitive bidding from Medicare Part D enjoyed by the Veteran’s Administration and the military! Face it, Sir. Out of all the really, really stupid wars that you have naively bought into, including the “War on Drugs,” “The War on Terror,” “The War on Poverty,” all representing excuses for not having organized policies, the only important war is “The War on Corporate Welfare!”
Al Finkelstein 12/14/12