Unscrewing
The Taxpayers January 30, 2013
I’ve been telling you that congress
is the AWOL gang and that AWOL stands for Absent Without Leaving—they’re there,
but they’re just strutting and fretting their hours upon the stage, full of
sound and fury, and accomplishing nothing.
The fiscal cliff deal revealed a whole new meaning for AWOL—Actually
Working On Legislation—a circumstance exponentially more dangerous and costly
than the first.
This
time, a small group of Senate “Trust Me” boys added a provision to the final
deal that gave Amgen (the dollar dropping drug company) another (that means a
second) two-year moratorium on compliance with Medicare pricing on its oral
drug for dialysis patients. It’s worth
about half a billion dollars! Wait, does
that mean that the endangered Medicare program will pay $500,000,000 more than
it needs to for Amgen drugs? Yuup! You
mean Amgen, the company that is guilty of crime for which it was fined over
$750 million? Yuup! You mean the American taxpayers are going to
pay them the equivalent of 2/3 of their record-setting criminal fine? Yuup!
Of
course this is a provision that had no place in a fiscal cliff deal, benefiting
a criminal company that had no legitimate place at the table. Around here, we call this predatory
legislative malfeasance. This is what
your elected representatives are doing to you when nobody is looking. Why not ask YOUR AWOL gang members what they
plan to do to unscrew the taxpayers?
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