Budget Buster: Kent Conrad's Long Opposition To The Public Option

Sam Stein and Ryan Grim
Budget Buster: Kent Conrad's Long Opposition To The Public Option

First Posted: 08-21-09 12:22 PM | Updated: 08-21-09 01:12 PM


Kent Conrad, the Democratic Senator who declared the public health insurance option dead on Sunday, portrays his activism on behalf of health insurance cooperatives as the conscripted service of a pragmatic warrior.

The public option, he has said over and over, just doesn't have the 60 votes he thinks are needed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

The accuracy of that supposed whip-count aside, Conrad's opposition to offering consumers a government-run alternative to private insurance companies goes deeper than political pragmatism.

Though he has refused to take a public position on the matter, in private meetings with colleagues and staff dating back to the beginning of the year, Conrad has repeatedly expressed his opposition to a public option, four top Democratic aides who've sat in meetings with him told the Huffington Post.

Conrad, they say, sees the public option as a dangerous expansion of federal responsibility for health care spending. "His position seems based on ideology more than practicality," said one of the aides.

Without fundamental changes to the health care system, Conrad sees the public option as unable to reduce the cost of health care. The argument by proponents of the public option that a government-run alternative within the insurance market would drive that fundamental change and help push health costs lower apparently doesn't hold any water with him.

Instead, he has presented a vague proposal to create health insurance cooperatives as an alternative.

snip//

Beyond ideology or pragmatism, however, the North Dakota Democrat has a pocketful of other reasons to oppose a public option. Despite being from a state where campaigns cost a relative pittance, Conrad has found himself the recipient of largess from a host of private actors with interests in the health care debate. Over the course of his career he has received more than $828,000 from insurance companies, $610,000 from health professionals, and $255,000 from Pharmaceutical and health product companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In 2009 alone, Conrad has watched industry cash pour in at a high rate, according to a review of FEC filings. His Political Action Committee, DAKPAC, received a $2,500 donation from the American Medical Association; $2,000 donations from the pharmaceutical companies Merck & Company and Eli Lilly; as well as $1,000 donations from Johnson & Johnson, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, American Hospital Association, AstroZeneca, Abbott Laboratories, Boehringer Ingelheim, and the Federation of American Hospitals.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/21/budget-buster-kent-conrad_n_264123.html

Perhaps we should buy him.

:shrug:

:dem:

-Laelth

I think that would be fitting.

May he pay for all the lives lost because of the bribes he takes.

:nuke:

and resign from your position in the Finance committee and let the REAL Democrats do the work.

You can voice your opposition after you are forced to vote YEA after a lot of North Dakotans are threatening to poke you with a cattle prod.

Hawkeye-X

EDIT: corrected location. Sorry.

Unless you are talking about some kind of state rivalry.

history of "Rugged Individualism". More ingrained "distrust
of government". Taking any assistance from government---nada.

This world view is quite different than say people from Metropolitan
area.

It might have better to had at least 2 persons with differing
world view on that Committee.

It is not that wretches like this vote as they do because they are bribed to vote against some natural inclination; they get the bribes because the paymasters recognize they will vote they way they do, and want them to remain in place to do so, and to be happy while they do it. This deluded 'can't abide gummint' type would still talk this drivel whether he was paid or not, he just would not be a Senator if he was not paid so handsomely for doing it.