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No Time To 'Wait And See' On Health Law (07/20/2010)
By Dr. Quentin Young and featured in the Spring 2010 PNHP Newsletter (here excerpted)

Wall Street is very comfortable with the new legislation. Mutual fund analysts now say it's increasingly clear that the law is beneficial for health industry stocks, particularly for pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies, because there are no "onerous cost controls" in the law. And health insurance company stocks continue a yearlong trend upward, and the industry's CEO salaries continue to be astronomical.

After all, the health insurers wrote the bill. Sen. Max Baucus was recently caught on tape heaping effusive praise on his aide Elizabeth Fowler for her pivotal role in crafting the legislation. Fowler is a former vice president of WellPoint, the giant health insurer.

Baucus himself, a key actor in this bad movie, was surrounded by health industry lobbyists from the very beginning, and he has received more than $2.8 million in campaign contributions from these toxic sources over the past few years. That he earned his payoff was demonstrated when Karen Ignagni, the president of America's Health Insurance Plans, congratulated him on his handling of the single-payer nonviolent disruption of his Senate Finance Committee hearing after single-payer advocates like Dr. Margaret Flowers were excluded from giving testimony.

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