Senator John Cornyn and those damn surprise medical bills

In this week’s edition of asshats in Washington — we bring you Texas Senator John Cornyn who has now been revealed to be the benefactor of a massive dark-money scheme to prevent a legislative bill from being passed. That bill for those that don’t know would’ve abruptly stopped the massive surprise medical bills one might see after an unplanned visit to the emergency room.

Editors note: Dark money is a loose political term used to describe money that flows into politics from otherwise naughty benefactors who usually have agendas or may be politically biased. Think of the Trump family; the Russian’s, and The Mercer ‘s in upstate New York.

The original bill can be seen here.

According to reports, Cornyn initially supported a wide-ranging bill about a year or so ago that would’ve completely stopped the surprise medical bills many Americans have come to known so far in their lives. However, soon after news of the bill surfaced — the dark money campaign began and largely on a vicious nationwide scale.

Editors note: In laments terms here, let’s think of this using the term lobbying. While there might be a small and rare handful of lobbyists out there who have good intentions — lobbying could easily be confused for allowing dark money into politics. Because allot of the time the two almost go hand in hand.

So as it appears you can kinda sorta blame John Cornyn for this.

The part that upset insurance companies and lobbyists was the idea that the government wanted to end surprise billing — which was easily defined as the practice of in network hospitals out of network doctors.

Such a practice is so common — these days you can have an in network hospital; out of network doctor, out of network nurse, and so on. The unfortunate part of that practice was the little known fact that it wasn’t actually the hospitals charging you for the doctors — it instead was the doctors and doctors groups’ randomly charging astronomical prices at their discretion for said services.

Buzzfeed News has a further in depth analysis of Cornyn ‘s ties to dark money; lobbyists, and how two very particular groups bought up doctors groups that later resulted in steep increases in surprise bills across America.