By GottaLaff
What an experience it must have been, being bought and sold by lobbyists. Check out The Health Care Reform Shopping Spree of '09:
Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed the sweeping overhaul.
Those stakeholders, including the drug industry, doctors, hospitals and manufacturers of medical products, were responsible for one out of every five dollars doled out on lobbying during that period, according to a CQ MoneyLine analysis of lobbying disclosure reports filed with Congress.
This was the mother of all lobbying efforts. This was the Godzilla of special interest check writing. This was... kind of nauseating.
If only there were a breakdown of who spent what.
Within the health care industry, drug companies racked up the biggest lobbying tab, spending $253 million. They were followed by hospitals, which spent $108 million, and doctors and surgeons, who spent $59 million.
However, according to one Brookings Institution political scholar, much of the lobbying budget was spent on behalf of reform.
The health care industry’s lobbying easily outpaced other sectors with interests on Capitol Hill, including energy and natural resources, finance and insurance, and communications and technology, the CQ MoneyLine analysis found.
Even as other sectors scaled back during the recent economic downturn, health companies continued to pump big bucks into influencing Congress.
Imagine what we could have done with all that money, the lives that could have been saved, the number of movable health clinics that could have staged events.
Wait just a minute... Does all this mean that lobbyists were... spreading their wealth? Don't look now, but they may have joined Club Socialist!
“The real winners in the health care debate were the lobbyists who were laughing all the way to the bank, even in a tough economy,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
And if they were the winners, guess who the losers were....
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