Pimps and Whores, The Chicago Way

Until about a week ago it was okay with Congress for health insurance companies to engage in, “price-fixing, bid-rigging and market allocation.” But suddenly, in a fit of moral outrage, the Democrats decided to strip health insurance companies of the antitrust exemption that Congress had previously granted them. What gives?

The problem was that the insurance companies had the audacity to challenge the legislation that Democrats were crafting that had the obvious intention of destroying private health insurance. And when the insurance companies spoke up in their own defense, the Democrats retaliated.

A study commissioned by insurance companies and conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that Obamacare would add $4000 annually to the average American family’s insurance premiums by 2019.

The insurance companies knew they were vulnerable but clearly decided that they would rather live without this antitrust exemption than face certain extinction under Obamacare. So, the Democrats retaliated against the insurance companies, as the insurers certainly knew they would. It’s the Chicago way. And that’s how we are now governed.

This should serve as an object lesson for the American Medical Association. The AMA has been in a dance with the Democrats, who were dangling a quarter trillion dollar incentive before the doctors in exchange for the AMA’s support for Obamacare.

As the law is now written, doctors are due to have their Medicare reimbursements slashed by 21% this January. These cuts will take effect unless Congress acts to defer them, which is what the AMA lobbies for every year. The Democrats were dangling the prospect of a ten-year moratorium on Medicare reimbursement cuts before the AMA in exchange for giving Democrats political cover. This would have cost the taxpayers a quarter of a trillion dollars and would have blown a major part of the saving that was an essential element of the supposedly fiscally sound Baucus reform bill.

As the insurance companies have learned, when Congress makes you a dependent, they expect obedience. What Congress giveth, Congress will taketh away if you tick them off.

This alliance between an easily corruptible Congress and an equally corruptible private sector has yielded other unholy alliances.

You’ve probably noticed that the NBC family of networks is easily the furthest left of all the mainstream news media. In particular NBC has provided the “greenest” programming out there. A few years ago, NBC had a green week during which it broadcast news from threatened glaciers in Greenland and from Antarctica where penguins were imperiled by global warming.

The Weather Channel has become a non-stop shill for Al Gore’s wacky theories. And of course, MSNBC has become the full-throated howl of the extreme left.

If we turned over a stone or two, might we find a cause other than ideology for NBC’s subservience to the Democratic Party? Well yes, we would, now that you ask.

NBC is owned by General Electric. And GE has a huge investment in “green technologies” such as wind turbines. Wind turbines are unreliable, hideously expensive and economically infeasible – unless the government subsidizes their construction and compels the use of the electricity they generate. Congress is only too happy to comply.

And if that weren’t enough, GE is likely to reap another generous benefit at your expense for its service as the Democrat’s propaganda organ. Three weeks ago a provision was inserted into the Democrats’ climate bill that would require all commercial and military jets to use General Electric’s “green” jet engines.

GE is the world’s largest manufacturer of jet engines and they have designed a new, low emission engine that would probably not be competitive in the marketplace because it is so much more expensive than more conventional engines. And so, in what has become the tradition of American politics, when your product is uncompetitive in the marketplace, you outlaw the free market.

And NBC is reaping other benefits from its propagandizing. While the Obama Administration tries to freeze out Fox News by keeping its allies from appearing on Fox shows, Obama took valuable hours out of his fundraising activities Monday to sit down with MSNBC’s most radical hosts, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, for an off the record chit chat.

It just goes to show that facilitating prostitution is not the sole province of ACORN. The government is happy to pimp for companies willing to prostitute themselves. But, as everyone knows, you don’t cross your pimp.