Here's a Hidden History that will broadcast tommorrow regarding Joe Lieberman's glaring conflict of interests in the Healthcare Reform area.
This is, hopefully, a nice compact (less than 2mins) MP3 on Lieberman and his wive's various problems--to put it kindly -- with their continued genuflection at the altar of big Pharma....
Download the MP3 here...
This will be aired tomorrow at 10 am on WRIR FM, Richmond, VA (97.3). Please feel free to pick up and distribute to other low band FM stations if interested.
Transcript is below:
Joe Lieberman is in the news this week for flip flopping on his previous position on Medicare and claiming that he now objects to younger adults of 55 years of age receiving the service. Previously, of course, Senator Lieberman told a group of constituents that he thought a plan that would allow 50-55 year old to take advantage of Medicare would be fine.
Why the sudden flip flop? Follow the money.
Senator Lieberman’s wife, Hadassah Lieberman, is a strategist and lobbyist for pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.
According to Jane Hamsher:
For decades, [she] has worked for the insurance-pharmaceutical-lobbying complex. Like Newt Gingrich, Dick Gephard and Tom Daschle she never registered as a lobbyist to avoid the official taint, but nonetheless worked at the powerhouse lobbying shops Hill & Knowlton and APCO. She also did stints at Pfizer and Hoffman-La Roche.
Lieberman, himself has received more than $1 million dollars in insurance company campaign contributions since 1998. He seems to have amply rewarded the insurance companies for their attentions.
Lieberman introduced a bill in 2005 shortly after his wife joined Hill & Knowlton that would award billions of dollars in new "incentives" to companies like GlaxoSmithKline to persuade them to make more new vaccines. This bill, in fact, was written by Chuck Ludlam, a former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist who then worked on the Connecticut senator's staff.
As Joe Conason has written:
From his office to his bedroom, Lieberman was totally surrounded by current and former employees of Big Pharma. Ludlam has since retired, and Mrs. Lieberman has quit her job too -- but Lieberman still looks like a politician wholly owned by one of the nation's most troublesome special interests.
Of course, there’s an outside chance that Senator Lieberman really is making a principaled stand against public health care that would save millions of lives while reducing our debt. There’s probably even an outside chance that the millions in campaign contributions from Health Insurance firms and his own wife’s payola in this regard were largely divorced from his decision to destroy the single best opportunity to pass a decent health care bill in this century.
But that’s a hypothetical hidden history, the present reality is far worse—or as Jim Shea, a columnist in The Hartford Courant put it recently, "If you think you are sick of Joe Lieberman now just wait until you get sick."