The big sell-out

LITTLE ROCK — WITH A proposed health-care bill that might have been designed by Frank Kafka in collaboration with Rube Goldberg, it’s taken a lot of arm-twisting, creative accounting, and nifty little deals to move it along.

If there were any doubt about that, just look at all the special favors that have been granted individual senators in exchange for their support. The longer a senator held out, the more he could expect to exact from Pelosi, Reid & Co., who’ve been offering sweet deals galore. There have been so many negotiated that an alphabetical list by state goes on and on, making extensive and envious reading for anybody in Arkansas. This list, which is surely incomplete, was compiled by the Wall Street Journal:

Connecticut gets $100 million for a medical center at its state university,

Florida gets to keep the benefits of Medicare Advantage for its seniors -a $3 billion to $5 billion savings-which means those of us in other states get to pay for it.

Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu got a special $300-million subsidy for her state’s Medicaid program predicated on its having been hit by Katrina. Struck by the same devastating kind of storms, Mississippi and Texas didn’t rate the same payoff.

Massachusetts got $500 million in higher Medicaid reimbursements, Vermont $600 million. (Folks in New England must be worthier than those of us here in Arkansas.) Vermont would get another $10 million for community health-care centers. Like it’s the only state with health centers that could use some help.

Michigan got exempted from the insurance fees that would otherwise be billed to Michigan Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Montana’s hospitals will be eligible for higher reimbursements, at least if they’re considered “frontier” hospitals. Ditto, hospitals in Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota. Folks who live in the vicinity of Libby, Montana, a superfund site that handles asbestos, got a special break on their Medicare coverage. The fabled frontier spirit is now to be government-subsidized.

Thanks to the wonders of parliamentary procedure, every senator got a chance to cast the decisive 60th vote needed to move this mammoth bill forward. Nebraska’s Ben Nelson demanded a particularly high price for his; his state won’t have to pay the $100 million in additional costs needed to extend Medicare there. In addition, the senator from Mutual of Omaha finagled a $6.7 billion break for that lucky company. (Luck, of course, had precious little to do with it.)

And these are only some of the backroom bargains that have been negotiated. Who knows what others lurk in the thousands of largely unexamined pages of these bills? All of which will be defended as just politics as usual. “Laws are like sausages,” it has been said, “it is better not to see them being made.” But to compare this profusion of smelly deals to sausage-making is to libel sausages.

As for those senators who didn’t collect this kind of baksheesh for their votes but meekly swallowed the administration’s package, the Wall Street Journal concluded: “Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh must feel like saps. The Arkansas and Indiana senators spent months caterwauling about this or that provision in the Senate health-care bill, then at 1 a.m. Monday they voted to speed its passage without getting so much as a lousy T-shirt.”

How come? If you’re going to cave, why get so little for your state in return? That ought to be the first question Arkansas voters ask Senator Lincoln when she comes around asking for our votes next year.