Healthcare bill gets worse in a hurry

Behind closed doors, this healthcare bill is getting worse
in a hurry.

Not only is the process defying the wishes of the American
people. Remember when the president said during last year’s campaign that he
promised that his healthcare bill would be negotiated in the open, in front of
the C-SPAN cameras? Well, that didn’t happen, did it?

Basically, the president is telling the American people that
they can’t handle the truth of the legislative process. And they don’t like
that very much.

The amazing thing is that on one particular provision, the
White House and a few powerful barons of the House are defying the wishes of
the Congress, too.

This provision has to do with biological drugs.

America leads the world in biological-drug research. Because
we have a free-market system, we have more small companies that are looking for
the cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS than any
other country in the world.

This industry creates not only the life-saving drugs of the
future. It also creates the good-paying jobs now and in the future.

The provision that both the House and Senate agreed to would
allow this industry to continue to thrive, by allowing these companies to have
the exclusive use of their patents for a reasonable time frame, to allow them
to recoup their investments and give the industry enough incentives to make it
attractive to continue to invest in the sector.

Makes sense, right?

We need investment in the life-saving drugs of the future.
We need good-paying jobs. What’s the problem?

The problem is that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the
chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, didn’t like the provision. He
doesn’t really like private industry in the first place, and he didn’t like
getting rolled in the committee, which he did when Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.)
easily won an amendment Waxman opposed during the committee markup.

The Eshoo amendment protected the inventions of the small
researchers who are doing their best to create the next generations of cures.

The White House is going to screw Waxman on a variety of
different things in this conference committee. They are going to drop the
public option. They are not going to do the huge tax on so-called rich people.
They are not going to go to a single-payer system.

So they decided to throw Waxman a bone, by screwing the only
industry that is creating both the life-saving medicines and the high-paying
jobs of the future.

That is what I call ugly. And that is the kind of stuff that
is making Scott Brown, who has promised to vote against this healthcare
monstrosity, a much more likely winner next Tuesday, than Martha Coakley, who
has promised to vote for it, could have ever imagined only two weeks ago.

A bad process is leading to a bad result on healthcare
reform, and that will lead to a bad Election Day for the Democrats next
Tuesday.

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