| | |  Americas & Beyond | October 2009 
Millions Spent by Lobbyists to Thwart US Health Reform
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October 04, 2009
| | The President and First Lady meet with Peter Gaytan who is fighting with insurance companies about his cancer treatment. (The White House) | |
America's private health care industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several months in an attempt to stop President Obama's health care reforms, and specifically to thwart the "public option" offered as part of the overall plan. Some $380 million has been spent in this effort to date on television commercials attacking reform, and on health care lobbyists who outnumber members of congress 6 to 1 on Capitol Hill.
Reform groups and industry analysis say these efforts have already paid great dividends for the health care industry - specifically insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals - by undermining several key elements of the original reform plan. Pharmaceutical companies will not be forced to place a cap on their prices, and insurance companies stand to reap enormous profits because millions of Americans will be forced to purchase insurance under the revised plan.
A key element in the health care industry's push to upend Obama's health care reform push has been large donations to influential members of Congress. One example is Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), who has become a central player in the drafting of health care reform legislation. Baucus has accepted $1.5 million in donations from the health care industry in the last year, and other members of Congress have likewise received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the industry.
"The health industry permeates the process in other ways," reported The Guardian UK . "At Baucus's side, drafting much of the wording of the reform, was Liz Fowler, a senate committee counsel whose last position was vice-president of the country's largest health insurer, Wellpoint, which stands to be a principal beneficiary of the new law. Health companies and their lobby firms also recruit heavily among congressional staffers as a means of maintaining influence."
Some observers believe the Obama administration, wary of the disaster that befell the Clinton administration when it went up against the health care industry during their own attempts at reform, has become fearful of meeting the same fate, and this has caused them to back down on several key elements of true reform including price caps and the "public option." Robert Reich, labor secretary during the Clinton administration, wrote on his blog, "The White House made a Faustian bargain with big pharma and big insurance, essentially scuttling both of these profit-squeezing mechanisms in return for these industries' agreement not to oppose healthcare legislation with platoons of lobbyists and millions of dollars of TV ads."
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