Conflict of Interest

No surprise why there's a private insurance mandate, with no public insurance option, and single payer- what everyone wanted and all those economically stable chocolate-making countries have had for decades- wasn't even considered.

Brad Jacobson:

While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats' massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Avedon]

Disclosure time: I'm a biomedical scientist, so I work loosely in the healthcare industry too. Most of modern medicine is based on scientific advances that have little to do with anything the industry could have done by itself. Most of modern medicine is based on science funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health since the second world war. You know- from taxpayer supported work funded by the United States government.

Without this work, every teaching hospital, and soon afterwards, every private hospital, would cease to be. Big Pharma and the insurance bank$ters would have no market. Believe it or not, the only sector of the economy relatively untouched by the Great Recession is a supported by socialism already.

Every healthcare professional decrying single payer as socialist is a hypocrite as is the President who planned on gutting this to support the bank$ters who bankrolled him.