Two stories today tell you a great deal about Republican attitudes toward health care in this country. One, predictably with the end of a Congressional session, was done on a Vampire Vote in the middle of the night. Via WaPo:

Republican lawmakers, with little public debate, quietly added a billion-dollar health-care benefit to legislation that was rushed through Congress just before it adjourned Saturday morning.

…The legislation allows anyone to shelter thousands of dollars annually in H[ealth] S[avings] A[ccount]s, regardless of how much that person pays for a health-insurance deductible. [The short: it was raised from $2,700 for an individual or $5,450 for a family to $2,850 for individuals and $5,650 for families.)

Now let’s look at the story from the Post-Gazette:

But by most estimates, nearly half of all private-sector workers in the United States do not have a single day of paid sick leave. And more do not have a paid day off that can be used to care for a sick child.
[snip]  Read more 

They are really cheap whores, our leaders. I was reading this and wondering, “where’s the real money?” Then I hit this passage:

Public Citizen’s Congress Watch The Bankrollers 37

In recent years, Kies has used his remarkable skill and motivation to lobby Congress and the IRS to retain a tax credit that costs the Treasury an estimated $1 billion to $4 billion a year and appears to serve no public policy purpose other than enriching the businesses that exploit it.56 It’s called the synfuel tax credit, and it stems from a 1980 law created by Congress as an incentive to use coal and other fossil fuels to create synthetic natural gas and oil as alternatives to foreign sources of energy.57 But tax sleuths eventually figured out that the law’s loose definition of synthetic fuels could be exploited to claim massive tax credits for producing products that barely differed from conventional fuels.58

By 2006, opportunistic companies – including the hotel chain Marriott and retail electronics chain Rex Stores Corp. – had created 55 plants that were fashioning synfuel by such means as spraying regular coal with diesel fuel, pine-tar resin, limestone or various other substances. Industry critics call the practice “spray and pray,” the prayer being that the IRS doesn’t conduct an audit that results in an unfavorable ruling. Time, which has published a pair of exposés on synfuel, estimated that the tax credit cost the Treasury $9 billion from 2003 to 2005.  Read more