Mob Rule, Healthcare Style

You wanna talk all old-school? Then remember this rule:

 I am the one  who calls the shots!

-Tony Soprano

Fomer House Speaker Newt Gingrich had an interesting piece in the Washington Examiner last week, comparing House Energy and Commerce Committee poopah Henry Waxman to TV Mafioso Tony Soprano. I think we're making  progress when the two sides in the healthcare debate stop referring to each other as "Hitler" and wick the rhetoric back to TV crime characters.

Chairman Waxman has sent a letter to over 50 of the nation's largest health insurers demanding they produce for him a pile of information. This information includes:

• what their best paid executives make
• where the companies hold their offsite meetings
• who sits on their boards of directors and what they get paid

Why? Speaker Gingrich says its part of a coordinated attack by Democrats to intimidate insurance companies in the midst of the healthcare battle. What's curious to me is the fact that there are multiple stakeholders that have shaped our current healthcare system. For example:

• The Congress which has mandated that hospitals eat the bill for treating those without insurance, the unintended consequence of which has been to pass that cost on to the rest of us with insurance
• The tort bar, which has made billions of dollars on spurious suits against healthcare providers and their insurance companies, further raising healthcare costs and insurance rates
• A succession of DHHS agency executives who have let Medicare and Medicaid fraud and explode over the last 30 years
• International pharmaceutical companies whose pricing schemes are more opaque and confusing than airline fares
• Providers who no longer accept Medicare or Medicaid patients, partly because of conditions imposed on them by DHHS and state agencies

Why haven't they been drawn into this Inquisition? Could it have something to do with the fact that associations and lobbyists supporting the drug industry and doctors have cut what they feel is the best deal they can get and are supporting the Democrats' monster bill? And that the national Democrat Party has for years been the handmaiden of the tort bar?

This is intimidation, plain and simple, says Speaker Gingrinch. No different than if Vito and Paulie pay you a visit one night because you're a little behind on the vig.

Waxman may rough up the insurance execs a little. His bill, frankly, will go to the floor in any shape he wants it to. The House may pass it. The Senate and House may eventually send a bill to the president. He may sign it, giving Democrats the brave new world of healthcare they seek. But any law built on intimidation and bullying will have about has much legitimacy as a contract put out by an angry capo.

Just thought you might like to know.