How do the conservatives balance this?

So I have a serious question.

What is the higherarchy of fiscal conservatve priorities? There is a lot of talk recently about giveaways to lawmakers by lobbyists and lobbying firms. I want to look at another layer of this though.

In the article titled:Closed-Door Deal Makes $22 Billion Difference at WAPO today there are some very interesting questions raised. A shorter version of the article would be to say that Republicans have been increasingly making fiscal decisions with constant input from industry lobbyists and with total exclusion of Democrats in closed session conference committees. These bills, when passed have a tendancy to run favorable to the interests of the lobbyists often to the tune of Billions of dollars of savings for industry, and sometimes just plain payoffs.

Now I know that the republican party is the party of industry. It goes without saying. They believe that having a strong private sector with as little government regulation as possible is vital to the nation's health. I will concede that to a point they are very correct.

Here's the rub. At what point does giving taxpayer money away to industry become poor fiscal policy? In other words, Congress is in charge of spending tax money wisely; they are not in the business of enriching industry. If they want to loosen regulation, fine. If they want to cut taxes, ok. Not great but ok.

It looks like the way this medicare bill was set up was that the taxpayers would pay out more in the form of medicare payments to the insurance industry otherwise (it was reported) the industry will just stop insuring people. We're not giving an incentive for good behavior, we're just paying them off. Is that what all of that vaunted conservative fiscal policy is all about? It sounds to me like a prettier version of extortion.

So we come to my main question. What is more important to fiscal conservatives? Is it helping industry and big business or is it ensuring the governments money is well spent? Are they losing sight of their traditional values of fiscal responsability in favor of doing anything to help out a lobbying group.

It seems to me that they are losing their way.