Ed Silverman reports for STAT that a provision tucked into the 21st Century Cares legislation exempts companies from reporting payments made to doctors, journals, or textbooks. “The move — which has sparked objections from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — is the latest in a long-running attempt to roll back requirements for reporting such payments to a federal database that tracks financial relationships between companies and physicians.”
The good senator doesn’t realize that health care is about the financial health of providers, pharmaceutical companies and political allies, not the physical health of citizens. In fact, there are probably certain ideologues who consider a healthy citizenry to be a negative, because that means more people living long enough to collect Social Security and private pensions, taking money out of circulation that should be profitably used by rich folks speculating in investment bubbles.
Corruption in business meets corruption in politics, and you don’t get a movie out of it, no, instead you get a backroom deal, and the people get the shaft. This is a supreme test for the olfactory glans, the Obama administration would stink if the Trump administration didn’t stink that much more. Get used to it. If climate change were occurring, we might have to do something about pollution…again.
