Healthcare reform: For the people or the corporations?

"My worst fear is that they are going to pass something that they're going to claim is something good, and it's perhaps going to be even worse than what we have now," said the Bloomington Hospital Emergency Room doctor and advocate for a single-payer healthcare system.

Specifically, Stone is worried the public option that is supposed to offer competition to private insurance companies -- "the people who are going to the trough and sucking money out of our health care system" -- will instead enable them to insure the "healthy and the wealthy" and dump the poor and sick onto the public plan.

Diary of a Heartland Radical

Since I cannot read minds, I cannot say why Bayh is dragging his heals on health care. It may be that he is afraid on Republican TV ads. But it seems more likely that he is simply protecting his wife’s gig and as a member of the board of directors of Wellpoint.

Our good friends at Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan are doing their best to alert the people of Indiana to Bayh’s conflict of interest.

WellPoint director Bayh conflicted, activists say

WellPoint Inc. CEO Angela Braly faced pointed criticism of her company and of WellPoint Director Susan Bayh from a handful of shareholders at the health insurer's annual meeting this morning.

Two shareholders used a question-and-answer session to charge Bayh with a conflict of interest because her husband, Sen. Evan Bayh, will have a vote on health care reform legislation being drafted in Congress.

Will this man play de Klerk to Conyers’ Mandela?

Yesterday nyceve had a diary on health care that asked readers to contact Richard Lugar and ask him to introduce a Senate version of HR 676. Since Lugar was specifically singled out, I assume there is some reason to believe that he is receptive to the idea. I don’t know much about Lugar other than the obvious, and I don’t know much about Indiana politics. What follows is pure speculation, make of it what you will.

One of my high school teachers was fond of saying that there were two reasons for everything, the good one and the real one.

Sits on Wellpoint's Board of Directors

Susan Bayh, wife of Senator Evan Bayh, sits on the board of directors of Wellpoint, a huge health insurance company. poputonian has an excellent run down of the history of Wellpoint.