Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer today. Graham made a statement that demonstrates perfectly why Republicans should not be allowed to govern.
Graham said:
This idea that the government has to be involved in the private sector to make the private sector honest really is troubling, because that's not the way America works.
Graham is either really stupid or a liar.
Senator Graham made the statement in reply to Blitzer's question about the public option, "a government-sponsored health insurance plan." Graham's response:
Nobody in this country can compete with the government. This idea that the government has to be involved in the private sector to make the private sector honest really is troubling, because that's not the way America works...
Even though Graham was talking about health care, I immediately thought of numerous instances where the government had failed to keep the private sector honest, and the government and consumers suffered as a result.
No one can blame a company for making money; that is why they exist. One can blame a company for breaking the law to make money. Looking just at the health care industry over the last few years:
The Inspector General alleged in a 2005 report "that the government paid $285 million to chiropractors for services that they say should never have been billed."
In 2005, "South Florida providers accounted for 72 percent of the national total" of the $2.5 billion in HIV/AIDS claims submitted to Medicare. In 2006, HIV/AIDS beneficiaries in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach billed Medicare for half of all Medicare billings for the country, even though they had only 10% of the nation's Medicare beneficiaries.
In 2006, doctors overbilled Medicare by at least $17 million for chemotherapy treatments.
In 2006, Saint Barnabas Corp. operator of New Jersey's largest health-care network agreed to pay $265 million to settle claims that they had overbilled Medicare half a billion dollars. That would leave them with about $235 million as a premium for their transgressions.
Last year the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey overstated medical expenditures on federal cost reports by at least $21 million a year, "even while under the supervision of a federal monitor" for previous violations of the same laws.
That is just a few instances of private sector health care providers' dishonesty. We can't even count the number of times that contractors overbilled or defrauded the federal government in Iraq.
POGO's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database reports on contractors with "histories of misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations." Their database reports that the top 100 government contractors were awarded contracts worth $257.257 Trillion in 2007. Those same companies have been guilty of 678 instances of misconduct since 1995, worth $26.127 Trillion in penalties.
It should come as no surprise that KBR sits at the top of that list, with $103 million in penalties. That didn't stop the federal government from awarding them contracts worth $4.872 Trillion in 2007.
We don't have time to get into Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, or all of the other deregulated industies that have stolen from and cheated or defrauded the government and consumers.
So Senator Lindsey Graham must be either really stupid or a liar. The government does have to make the private sector honest.
That is one of the primary reasons why Republicans should not be allowed to govern.