"which makes him uniquely informed on dealing with the legal issues surrounding the scanner." Chertoff is not uniquely informed. He's a lawyer but I'd be will

"which makes him uniquely informed on dealing with the legal issues surrounding the scanner." Chertoff is not uniquely informed. He's a lawyer but I'd be willing to bet he's not even an expert on government regulation. He does have lots of contacts though. "First, representatives don't write their own bills. They are written by staffers, and these staffers are usually employed by the committees of the house, not the individual representative." True, he didn't write the actual words. He was chairman of the committee responsible for the legislation. He was in a position to ensure that it was written into the legislation that Medicare could not negotiate on the price of drugs. Bills do go through changes but it's not difficult for the chairman of the committee that wrote the bill to ensure that key provisions remained. You know, Congressman sometimes do have power and are more than mere voting machines. Staffers don't run everything. "Third, it unwise to construct elaborate bribery explanations when there are such easy, simply explanations. (Seniors are basically voting themselves money.)" It's not an elaborate theory. It's actually a simple one. Corruption does happen and a red flag ought to be raised when the Congressman whose committee wrote the part of the legislation forbidding Medicare from negotiating on the price of the drugs it was being forced to buy gets a $2 million a year consulting job. There is nothing elaborate about this and rational people will look askance at this situation. Bayesian probability can only be talked about in reference to a probability space and events of that probability space. It's not really relevant to talk about Baye's theorem in this instance since no events or probability space has been defined. I wasn't using probability theory. I was using the fact that in my mind the best explanation why a Congressman who gets a $2 million a year job from the drug industry after passing horrible legislation that tremendously benefits the drug industry is most likely (used in a colloquial sense) corrupt.