Jerry Flanagan Last Quotations

The drug industry dispensed $30 million in campaign contributions during the last election -- including $1 million to George W. Bush's campaign. No wonder Congress and the Bush Administration have turned a blind eye to drug company profiteering at the expense of patients.

Recent mergers have given the industry a strangle hold over the health insurance market. With fewer pressures for efficiency and no government oversight of rates, insurers have been given free rein to spend more of our health care dollars on overhead, profit, and administration. The last decade of HMO mergers has taught us that when fewer HMOs dominate the health care market, quality goes down, premiums go up, and patients get short changed. Already, 45 million Americans are uninsured because they cannot afford to pay the insurers' ransom.

HMOs and insurers pumping up their coffers at the detriment to seniors is a blight on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and is the last straw of their looting and pillaging of health care.