Digby is among the many web commentators teeing off on U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s apparent decision last week to choose insurance companies over consumers in the shaping of health care legislation.
She is a Blue State senator after all. As Ernie Dumas noted this week, Arkansas is a virtual Blue Cross insurance monopoly. Wrote Digby:
The insurance companies are using the vast wealth they accumulated in the run up to this crisis to keep from having to pay the piper. They do not want to have to compete with an entity that will be charged with actually serving their patients over profit. It’s not like they didn’t see it coming. They could have fixed many of the problems themselves and chose not to because they figured it was cheaper and easier to buy off the political class instead. We’ll see.
Senator Lincoln is running for reelection next year. One hopes for her sake that there are as many insurance company executives living in her state as there are Democrats because she’s going to need every one of those fat cats to vote for her once her constituents figure out who she’s actually working for.