Congress Helps Self to $3,100 Pay Raise

This is just unconscionable. First our local representative (Gilchrist) is one of the swing votes for the legislation:

House-passed measure attacks deficits by limiting spending for the first time in a decade on Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and other benefit programs that normally rise with inflation and eligibility.

THEN he allows a pay raise to go through without a glance.

These guys now make: $165,200 a year!
I want to know how he can come back in his district and face all the poor kiddies out here that rely on Medicaid for their health care?

Oh, I forgot, Scarlett,

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a vote for kids."

In actuality, it will be the pediatricians and family practice docs who will have to absorb some of this Medicaid cut. Who is going to deny care to children? (other than most of the specialists around here) Of course, poor people can afford copays for their kids antibiotics. Wouldn't want those pharmaceutical companies to have to decrease their profits, would we?

For those of you who are interested, Marcia Angell, one time editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, has done an excellent review of this situation in the New York Review of Books. Here is a tidbit:

The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion). In 2003 profits of the Fortune 500 drug companies dropped to 14.3 percent of sales, still well above the median for all industries of 4.6 percent for that year. When I say this is a profitable industry, I mean really profitable. It is difficult to conceive of how awash in money big pharma is.

...snip...

According to a report by the non-profit group Families USA, the for-mer chairman and CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Charles A. Heimbold Jr., made $74,890,918 in 2001, not counting his $76,095,611 worth of unexercised stock options. The chairman of Wyeth made $40,521,011, exclusive of his $40,629,459 in stock options.

Tell that to the kiddies, Mr. Gilchrist