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Cadillac Care for Big Business

Tim Carney points to the real winners in Obamacare’s passage: The health care bill Obama signed into law Tuesday is a triumph for the special interests. It will benefit the biggest businesses, and by injecting more government into the economy, it will permanently stimulate K Street. And once the bill passed, health care stocks rallied. […]

Tim Carney points to the real winners in Obamacare’s passage:

The health care bill Obama signed into law Tuesday is a triumph for the special interests. It will benefit the biggest businesses, and by injecting more government into the economy, it will permanently stimulate K Street.

And once the bill passed, health care stocks rallied. Insurance giant Aetna — whose product you are now required by law to own — hit its 52-week high the morning after. Drug maker Pfizer rose 4 percent Monday and Tuesday, increasing its market capitalization by $3.8 billion — almost a two-hundredfold return on the company’s $21.9 million lobbying effort.

… The bill is loaded with sugar plums for the drug industry:

Taxpayers will subsidize drug makers even more. Employers will be forced to give prescription-drug insurance to workers. Generic versions of biologic drugs will be kept off the market for 12 years. States will be forced to subsidize drugs through Medicaid. Americans will still be prohibited from importing cheaper drugs from China. Medicare will continue overpaying for drugs.

Far from being a smashing victory for the Left, real lefties like David Sirota are dismayed: “Democrats are now preposterously selling giveaways to insurance and pharmaceutical executives as a middle-class agenda. Same formula, same fat cat beneficiaries, same bleating sheeple herded to the slaughterhouse. The only difference is the Rube Goldberg contraption that Democrats are using to tend the flock.”

Obamacare is neither socialism nor capitalism, but a hybrid of corporate interests and state power, conjoined in blissful union at the expense of individual liberties at taxpayers’ wallets.

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