Mrs. Lieberman and Mrs. Bayh

Raking in even more health care cash than their husbands. Not for future campaigns, but for their personal bank accounts... which also enrich their husbands. After all, why should senators' families survive on $174,000 plus benefits?

The sad thing about our democracy is that it only takes chump change to corrupt it. A hundred thousand a year given to maybe three or four key senators, plus maybe five million or so to a handful of campaigns, is enough to kill robust health reform even with 60 senators. The industry doesn't even have to bribe Republicans; the GOP's opposition, after all, is based on the belief that since Clinton's health care failure led to the 1994 electoral debacle, a repeat strategy should yield a similar drubbing.

Our national GDP is $13 trillion, and health care is 15% of that. That means $2 trillion of our economy goes to health care a year. Corrupting senators Baucus, Lieberman, Conrad, Nelson and Lincoln, along with a couple of Blue Dogs in the House costs less than a millionth of that amount but pays off to the tune of billions of dollars a year... all of which goes to insurance and pharma stockholders, many of whom aren't even American citizens. Somewhere in Saudi Arabia there's a sheikh laughing his ass off at us as he watches his UnitedHealth Group stock go through the roof. Happy Halloween!