What is a Blue Dog?
Friday, July 31st, 2009Apparently, it is not Clifford’s alter-ego, but in fact a Democrat who receives almost, but not quite, as much money from special corporate interest groups such as the health insurance and financial industries as Republicans.
From today’s front page of the Washington Post, Blue Dogs Receive More Health Industry Backing Than Other Democrats (found via Beat the Press):
[The Blue Dog Coalition] has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.
A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money — about 25 percent — from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.
A little later in the article we get this:
“I know there were some that thought we were trying to stop health-care reform,” Ross said in an interview this week for The Washington Post’s “Voices of Power” series. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply wanted to slow the process down and ensure that we were working toward the kind of health-care reform that the American people need and want.“
According to these poll results, the American people want universal government-run health care. The Physicians for a National Health Program blog tells us that we could have this with the passage of one of three bills: “The House already has Rep. John Conyers’ H.R.676 and Rep. Jim McDermott’s H.R.1200, and now the Senate has Sen. Bernie Sanders’ S.703“.
OK, so that seems simple enough. So, why won’t Ross do what the majority of people want him to? Oh, right…
Ross has received nearly $1 million in contributions from the health-care sector and insurance industry during his five terms in Congress, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions.
At the end of the article, Charles W. Stenholm, a former congressman from Texas who was part of the original Blue Dog group in the mid-1990s and who is now a agriculture and health care lobbyist answers criticism that money in politics is corrupting the political system by saying that the Blue Dogs “have played a tremendously important role in keeping the process from getting out of control.”
Indeed. Real health care reform would take health care out of the control of the health insurance corporations. And we can’t have that. As Noam Chomsky points out, universal health care “has no political support; only the majority of the public.”
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link: The Center for Responsive Politics’ health care reform section
