State Senator Morgan Carroll of Aurora, Colorado, is a health care reformer. She has taken on the arduous task of introducing some transparency into doctors’ relationships with pharmaceutical companies. She introduced a bill in the Colorado legislature that would have banned drug companies from giving gifts to doctors or reselling patient prescription information for marketing purposes.
Carroll brought the bill before a committee of the legislature. The Democrats around her were a little stunned, and used procedural maneuvers to kill the bill. Here’s her words:
* the health care bill was assigned to a committee on business, not health
* President Groff refused even a short extension to consider amendments that may have achieved pharmaceutical / health care reform, effectively killing the bill on a deadline technicality.
* Chairwoman Veiga refused to even entertain a vote on an amendment — something I have never seen in 5 years, also effectively killing the bill on a flex of bald chairing power.
* Democratic Senator Heath indicated because he had Roche pharmaceuticals in his district he couldn’t vote for the bill.
* Democratic Senator Tochtrop said her concern was about samples, even though samples were exempted from the bill.
* Not one colleague could point to one provision of the bill or recommend one change. Normally, members of the same party will at least attempt to work with a bill sponsor. Here quite the opposite was true.
* The Senators left during the hearing intermittently to talk to the drug lobby outside the hearing, missing key testimony.
This is the usual procedure for killing good bills, and it is usually done behind the scenes. Since most of the Democrats who killed the bill also campaigned on reform of the health care system, they have to act quietly and don’t want any publicity.
Sen. Carroll has broken with etiquette, and written about the matter on her blog.
Democrats are outraged. Not about the bill. They meant to kill it. They are mad at Senator Carroll for talking out of school, about blogging about their activities.
Do we need any more evidence of the real problem we face? It’s not Republicans. They are what they are. It’s Democrats who are nothing more than beards for special interests while talking about reform.
Democrats are the problem. Democrats are the Problem.
Piece of Mindful 
Yeah, it’s the democrats that did this to our economy over the last eight years. Yeah, the great Republican party didn’t have any complicity whatsoever in causing the crisis that we find ourselves in today. Yeah, let’s cut taxes while we spend 12 billion a month during an illegal war. Yeah, it was the democrats that let lobbyists in Washington write legislature. Those tricky democrats. And it was those slimy democrats that committed political suicide by supporting all of those massive spending programs during the last eight year, all the while making it look like the great Republican Party was to blame.
You people care more about the Republican party than the country at this point. Wake up and smell the printing presses. We now have to print extra money because of the foolish policies that the party of middle aged white people supported. Go tell it to your friends, the rich, because everyone else is trying to fix the actual problems we are facing, the problems we were left to us by the Bush administration, and their crony’s who left with their tails between their legs.
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You’re missing the point – everything you say about the Republicans is true. It’s just that the Democrats are, as always, complicit and unwilling to undo what was done. It’s because Democrats exist not to fix things or make serious reform, but rather to preempt that from happening. Democrats take serious people like yourself and lead them down blind alleys, making sure that your genuine desire for real reform never amounts to anything.
We know what the Republicans stand for. That’s a given. Democrats are the problem. We need reformers, and instead, we get Democrats.
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