Monday, March 26, 2012

Banner day for corruption in Frankfort

House and Senate leaders have worked out an agreement to keep surgical costs artificially high in Kentucky and to hinder recovery efforts of at least tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the KRS placement agent scandal.

And you are very unlikely to read a word of it in the mainstream media.

Both HB 300 and HB 458 sailed through the Senate today. Both bills must go back to the House, but they will get quick approval there. The biggest problem with these bills is House and Senate leaders knew exactly what was in the bills and apparently none of the rank and file members bothered to understand or, perhaps, even read them.

HB 300 makes "placement agent" middlemen permanent fixtures in our already scandal-plagued pension system. The middlemen siphon off millons of dollars at a time from investment funds our elected officials should be protecting. Specifically, we should ban placement agents from our financial transactions, but instead we are writing them into the law as lobbyists who don't even have to report how much they are looting from us.

HB 458 keeps alive the seriously outdated and failed central planning of medical services scheme called "Certificate of Need." Governor Beshear is using the state's Certificate of Need program to implement ObamaCare. Senate President David Williams and House Speaker Greg Stumbo, by passing this bill, just made it easier for him to do that.

By keeping competition out of the health care industry, Williams and Stumbo are directly increasing your healthcare costs. But you don't have to thank them; the Kentucky Hospital Association already has.