Moyers Essay on Dick Armey & Freedomworks, healthcare

[fencesitter]

Moyers kicks ass with this....

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09182009/watch3.html

*****ANNOUNCER: Now, put your hands together and welcome the Chairman of FreedomWorks and former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey.

BILL MOYERS: Dick Armey is chairman of the advocacy group FreedomWorks, the main organizer of this protest. They played a big role in launching those so-called "taxpayer tea parties" last April and the town hall disruptions in August.

ARMEY: We protect and cherish freedom because it is precious in its own right and because it works. So let's give them the message: Freedom Works! Freedom Works! Thank you for letting me be here.

BILL MOYERS: Just who is Dick Armey? For one thing, he's among the most ardent opponents of President Obama's health care reform.

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BILL MOYERS: That kind of exaggeration is an old tactic for Mr. Armey, who recently told the ECONOMIST magazine:

ARMEY: "Politics is about 97 percent fiction and 3 percent imagination."

BILL MOYERS: He should know. Sixteen years ago Dick Armey was a Republican congressman from Texas who teamed up with a Republican congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, to kill President Bill Clinton's health care reform. They called it "Hillary Care" back then and Armey's main adversary was ...Guess who?
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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 eighteen years later, he was insured 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 darned handsome pile of dough."

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 eight 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 these federal health insurance plans by as much as 75% of the premium cost. Beneficiaries -- including members and retired members of congress like armey -- pay their share of the premiums with pre-tax dollars.

Not bad.

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