Lobbyists Won Key Concessions in Budget Deal

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

WASHINGTON — At a quarter till midnight last Friday, with a deal to avert a government shutdown barely an hour old, Senator Harry Reid phoned a fellow Democratic senator, Ron Wyden, at home and startled him with some bad news. “You lost free-choice vouchers,” Mr. Wyden recalls Mr. Reid telling him.

Even delivered in shorthand, the call’s meaning was clear to Mr. Wyden: a health care plan he had succeeded in getting passed months earlier despite furious lobbying by big business and labor had been pulled out of the blue and killed as part of the broader budget deal struck between the White House and Congress. What was most perplexing was that it had little to do with budgets or government shutdowns.

“I was flabbergasted, just flabbergasted,” Mr. Wyden, of Oregon, said Tuesday in an interview, describing the demise of a plan that would have allowed some 300,000 workers to pick their own insurance coverage through employer-financed vouchers.

With $38 billion in cuts on the line in a $3.5 trillion budget, the clash over federal spending played out in numbers so big that most standard calculators had trouble tracking all the zeros. But in the end, a handful of relatively small-bore line items affecting particular industries attracted some of the most aggressive lobbying behind the scenes, as business interests, health care providers and others fought to hold on to, or kill, proposals that affected their bottom line.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/us/politics/13lobby.html

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This story will be on the front page of Wednesday's Times.

[msongs]

1. lobbyists probably wrote the deal and the bill nt

[Newest Reality]

2. America Incorporated

is only preserving and protecting itself and its best interests!

It must shield itself from the needs and demands of the ordinary plebs who, like financial Guerrillas, might do it any harm as it continues its Great Recovery. The real enemy is The People and their expectations that work against the noble and bounty-creating institution of the Bottom-Line where from profits ensue for the deserved benefits of the true citizens of this great corporation.

All that is required now is to pull the filthy hands of the old, and the poor with their copious, useless children, from the edges of this Utopian dream come true that we are about to finalize. The weight of those lazy, diseased and unproductive freeloaders is a disgrace and must be eliminated for the sake of the true, the good and the righteous who can prove their worth on paper, each and every day.

A new era is about to dawn. There has been no better time in history to be a person of stature and wealth and we cannot let anyone or anything sabotage or dilute our march to manifest destiny. This is our goal, and to it we pledge our estates and wealth and every effort until it becomes the final reality and the law of the land and the planet. When our enemy is made powerless, those who are allowed to occupy this planet will inherit the privilege of serving us well, day and night, from birth to death.

Let it be so!

[bluestateboomer]

3. The only concessions we get to hear about

are the ones that union lobbyists had a hand in. That nasty AFL-CIO.

[ProudDad]

5. Wow, I must have missed that one...

When was it?

[Faux pas]

4. Wasn't part of 'The Change You Can Believe In' to get

lobbists out of DC?

[defendandprotect]

6. k