Barney Frank: Odds of Healthcare Reform Passing

Front and center of healthcare reform is none other than House Financial Services Chairman, Democrat Barney Frank.  Congressman Frank also happens to be an advocate for legalizing online gambling.

Gambling911.com reporter, Jenny Woo, recently asked Mr. Frank to give us odds of healthcare reform being passed.

"Well I probably can't give you the odds until we legalize gambling," he said.  "I don't want you and me to get in trouble here because I wouldn't want you to go and make a bet on it.  I think we are very likely to pass a pretty good bill.  I think the president had some false hopes that he was going to get some more of a publicness more for than planned to.  You know, that's not a problem if you can get both parties "okay" but we have elections and when one party wins - that's their responsibility and they should go ahead and discharge it."

Congressman Frank is especially confident that healthcare reform can be passed.

" We're not involved with healthcare ourselves at all.  We're actually working on the whole financial regulation trying to stop all the gambling that goes on with other people's money that some of the financial institutions have been doing.  So I definitely plan on this bill voted on in the house this fall.  It probably won't come up until the Senate jury next year but I plan on having this voted on the house and healthcare won't get in my way."

2008 Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate, Wayne Allyn Root, writing his commentary for the Gambling911.com website on Thursday, dismissed healthcare reform as "The Big Obama Healthcare Lie".

Root didn't give odds of healthcare reform passing either but compared it to the failure of a once popular gambling institution, Off Track Betting.

"OTB just declared bankruptcy," Root said.  "OTB (Off Track Betting) is government-run gambling. Not just any gambling- but rather the most profitable gambling business model on earth. You see OTB doesn't even take a chance. They cannot lose. They simply take a cut off the top to pay out winners, and keep the rest for themselves. Yet OTB is over $200 million in debt, and has over $500 million in unfunded liability for the pensions and healthcare of OTB's 40,000 employees.

"What does all this prove? That government is incompetent and cannot be trusted to run anything. That government fails at virtually everything it does- from running brothels in Nevada, to running gambling in New York. That many government employees couldn't survive even a week in the private sector. And of course that government wastes money by employing too many people and paying them far too much. I'll bet (excuse the pun) that OTB could run successfully and profitably with 4000 employees instead of 40,000. The moral to the story is if you can't make money in the sex or gambling business, you can't run the healthcare of the United States of America.

"But worst of all, the OTB story proves the foolishness of the idea of providing universal healthcare to 300,000,000 Americans. OTB is broke because they have $500 million in unfunded liabilities just from paying bloated pensions and free healthcare for 40,000 people. If you can't fund free healthcare for 40,000 people in the gambling business, can you even imagine the debt from trying to pay for free healthcare for every person in the country?"

Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher