Just a few days ago, in "A Positive News Day," I noted how the actions of Republican members of Congress speak much louder than their words in revealing that most of them consider big business as their true constituency. There are many who pay dedicated lip service to other constituencies such as small business (whose problems they do nothing to address - see below) and the elderly (the GOP strenuously opposed passage of Medicare, but its current members now find it politically expedient to defend it from dangers it doesn't face).
Lip service is one thing, but oral sex is another, and that (oh, figuratively speaking, of course!), the GOP legislators reserve exclusively for their best clients -- the giants in sectors like insurance, banking, pharmaceuticals, and energy. Thus, the "doughnut hole" in the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the only major piece of social legislation to be passed by six years' worth of Republican Congresses, is a loophole through which you could drive a large pharmaceutical truck loaded with stacks of hundred-dollar bills (the preferred medium of exchange of drug dealers).
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the recent skirmish in Congress over "reimportation" -- i.e., the idea of cutting Medicare costs for drugs by importing them from countries where they are cheaper. The proposal was soundly defeated by Republicans, and some Democrats joined them in killing it. But if the whole idea of reimportation sounds ludicrous to you, or if you might wonder why drugs made in the U.S. are much, much cheaper in Canada and elsewhere, you'd need to look again to the Republicans, who engineered into the drug benefit a clause forbidding Medicare to bargain on price. Now, there's free enterprise and competition at work for you! - and it's brought to you by the same people who claim to represent small business interests.
I am grateful to a reader for calling to my attention Paul Krugman's column "Disaster and Denial" which is an excellent review of how in current Republican thinking, dogma trumps fact, and mirage overcomes reality, resulting in a refusal to learn from empirical evidence. Krugman is writing about regulation in the financial sector, but the point applies equally well to health care, and even to defense.
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