Bill Moyers Asks Just Who Is Dick Armey?

Gone, but... not gone enough

This week Bill Moyers unmasked the real welfare queen Ronald Reagan only conjured up from his active imagination for his speeches. Meet Dick Armey, leader of FreedomWorks, the astroturf outfit that helped sucker the 60,000 people who took part in the Million Moron March last week. Moyers seems to think it is ironic that the marchers didn't know that Armey himself is a huge recipient of the kinds of benefits he has them marching to deny... themselves:

For most of his adult life their leader has benefited from just the kind of government, tax-supported health care he's fighting to keep them from having too. When Dick Armey taught economics at the University of North Texas, for 13 years, his health insurance was administered by the state and supplemented by the taxpayers. When he was elected to Congress, he was covered by the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan. And when he retired from Congress 18 years later he was ensured by that plan until he turned 66 and Medicare, another government program, kicked in. All the time he's been making some half a million dollars a year working for FreedomWorks and raking in lobbyist fees amounting to what he recently called 'a darn handsome pile of sough.'

You can't blame him for keeping his government health plan; it's great. It gave him a lot of options, dozens of private insurers to choose from and, with 8 million members in it, the federal government's got the muscle to negotiate some of the best premiums and drug prices in the country. That's not all. Taxpayers subsidize the federal health insurance plans by as much as 75% of the premium cost. Beneficiaries, including members-- and retired members-- of Congress, like Dick Armey, pay their share of the premiums with pre-tax dollars. Not bad!

Now get this: Dick Armey, thought so much of that federal health plan, the Cadillac of coverage, that he tried to keep it as his primary carrier instead of that other federal program, Medicare. Mr. Armey wanted an option, a government option, How about that? But he couldn't get out of Medicare without losing his Social Security. They're hitched together; you give up one, you give up both. So he's suing to divide the two. Now he says he's happy to buy his health insurance on his own. Why not? He's got that pile of dough. And there's the rub: Dick Armey is the epitome of those people with power and privilege who are insured against the vicissitudes of life and want no government assistance for any suffering-- except their own.

And all those members of Congress sitting their during the president's speech last week, Joe Wilson included, they too have Cadillac federal coverage subsidized by tax dollars. That's no lie,

Yesterday 6 conservative, anti-health care Democrats, Mark Pryor (AR), Evan Bayh (IN), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Claire McCaskill (MO), Herb Kohl (WI), and Mark Begich (AK), put their collective weight behind a push by Republicans and other reactionaries-- from insurance and health care industry financed Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman to former Insurance Industry executive Ben Nelson (still adamantly refusing to recuse himself from voting)-- to get Baucus to actually make his lobbyist-written bill, generally panned by everyone who's read it, even worse than it already is! They want him to cut costs further, but none of them favor the public option that would do just that-- and that is favored by 90% of their Senate Democratic colleagues. They think Baucus' bill, which is already too stingy to consumers, too generous to his (and their) campaign contributors and too harsh on the taxpayers, can be made even stingier.

Isn't it time to tie the health care reform legislation directly and indelibly to the health care that members of Congress and their families receive. That should have been step one all along-- either than or just having made the bill really, really simple-- simple enough even for the 60 haters and bigots in the Million Moron March: Medicare is now open to all Americans who decide that that is the best option to them. Now let's handle climate and energy legislation.