If you've been reading the headlines lately, you know the entire health care system is wobbling under Obamacare after huge price spikes in the insurance market.
UnitedHealth, the nation's largest health insurer and a company with deep ties to the administration, just announced it is slashing its participation in Obamacare after facing $1 billion in losses. Some analysts are warning growing instability of the market raises the specter of the dreaded “death spiral.”
That's how the rest of the country is experiencing Obamacare disaster. But in Washington, D.C., ensconced in their lucrative sinecures, a cabal of liberal technocrats are busily drafting Hillarycare II, the next chapter in their quest to fundamentally transform America.
Monday, a group of unelected experts released their plan for how to “curb rising drug prices” at a Washington press conference. Cynically, they touted their plans as “market-based solutions,” then proceeded to embrace some of the most draconian price-control schemes ever envisioned for the U.S. economy.
Leading the event was John Rother, a veteran lobbyist with deep ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Unless you follow the health care debate extremely closely, you might not have heard of Rother, a major single-payer healthcare backer. But he is one of the most important cogs in the Democrats' left-wing machine in D.C.
In the 1990s, Rother was the Jonathan Gruber of Hillarycare, helping draft, and then sell, Hillary's plan to nationalize the health care industry. Then a lobbyist for the AARP, Rother directed more than $10 million to push socialized medicine, including advertisements that demonized opponents of the proposal. Rother actually coined the phrase “global expenditure budget,” the euphemism Clinton used for price controls.
Newt Gingrich, who had just assumed the speakership in the electoral shellacking that occurred in the Clintons' first midterm, refused to meet with Rother, requesting to discuss health care with other AARP officials because of Rother's role as a “DNC apparatchik.”
During the debate, Rother lied, denying his role in drafting the bill. Years later, documents released from the National Archives contradicted his account.
After Hillarycare crashed and burned, Rother put major money and effort behind a single-payer ballot initiative in California.
In 2009, during the debate over Obamacare, Rother, who frequently visited the White House, according to visitor logs, quietly pushed single-payer behind the scenes. His other major contributions to the debate were defending “death panels,” endorsing the “public option,” warmly praising Kathleen Sebelius and explaining how the left-wing law is the true legacy of “beloved” Ted Kennedy.
Rother's pet legislative proposal is price controls on pharmaceutical drugs, which would decimate the research and development pipeline while leading to rationing for cutting-edge drugs.
He's called drug companies “bullies,” while openly threatening them to lower their prices or else face the wrath of legislation to curtail their profits. He backed drug “reimportation,” which would force U.S. firms to sell their products at prices set by overseas governments to Americans, and helped people skirt the law when it didn't pass. But he opposed the GOP plan to let people buy health insurance across state lines, because that would cut against big government regulations, not in favor of it.
Although possessing zero experience in the industry, Rother refuses to believe R&D is the reason for high drug prices, instead attributing it to “flat-out greed,” according to his remarks paraphrased by the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
This is a man with a big chip on his shoulder that wants the government to take over this industry, leaving it in shambles like Obamacare has done to health insurance. If the end result of wreaking havoc on millions of people's lives is single-payer, then that's all gravy for Rother.
Just remember that when you hear that Hillary's future minions are proposing “market-based” solutions.
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