Can the Obama administration get any more corporatist? Just what do they owe Max Baucus and his health insurance pals?
Baucus staffer who led health reform drafting moving to Obama administration
Liz Fowler, a key staffer for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus who helped draft the federal health reform bill enacted in March, is joining the Obama administration to help implement the new law…
Fowler headed up a team of 20-some Senate Finance Committee staffers who helped draft the bill in the Senate. She was Baucus’ top health care aide from 2001-2005 and left that job in 2006 to become an executive at WellPoint, the nation’s largest private insurer. She was vice president of public policy at WellPoint, helping develop public-policy positions for the company. In 2008, she rejoined Baucus to work on health reform legislation.
more from David Sirota at Huffington Post
Obama Hires Fmr. Wellpoint Exec to Implement Health Care Law
Clearly, this is a telling indictment of the health care law itself, strongly suggesting that it was constructed by the Obama administration – as some progressives argued – as a massive taxpayer-financed giveaway to private insurers like Wellpoint. And let’s be honest: In investment terms, Fowler has been a jackpot for the health industry. The industry maximized her public policy experience for their own uses when they plucked her out of the Senate. Then, having lined her pockets, they deposited her first into a key Senate committee to write the new health care law that they will operate under, and now into the administration that will implement said law. Any bets on how much Fowler will make when Wellpoint (or another health insurer) inevitably rehires her in a few years?
Sirota also points out that this was mostly ignored or buried by the Washington Media.
Up Date: Glen Greenwald weighs in on how fast the revolving spins on health care reform
Beginning in 2001, Liz Fowler was the Chief Counsel for the Senate Finance Committee in charge of health and entitlement issues, i.e., legislation that primarily affected the health care industry. As her own biography boasts:
In this capacity, she was responsible for overseeing health policy issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction, including Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, health tax issues and initiatives to provide health coverage for the uninsured. She played a key role in the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA).
Her work in that government position on health care was apparently quite pleasing to the health care industry because, in 2006, she was hired by the health care giant WellPoint to serve as its Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs — in other words, overseeing WellPoint’s lobbying and other government-influencing activities. Then, in 2008, once it was likely that there would be a Democratic President and thus a new, massive health care bill enacted, Fowler left WellPoint and returned to the Senate, as top aide to Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee Chairman who would oversee the drafting of the health care bill (Baucus’s previous top health care aide, Michelle Easton, a former PhRMA official, left to become a lobbyist for the health care industry).
Glen also quotes Marcy Wheeler at FDL who says
It’s a nice trick: send your VP to write a law mandating that the middle class buy shitty products like yours, then watch that VP move into the executive branch to “oversee” the implementation of the law. What could go wrong?!?!
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Where is the outrage at the Obama administration for this sell out to the health insurance industry?
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I am not even remotely surprised at Fowler’s appointment, Obama is a political novice and it show in his courting of the Republicans and the likes of Max Baucus who is a DINO.
The elections in the Fall are up for grabs. The voters don’t like the Republicans but don’t see the Democrats as any better. I suspect there will be very low voter turn out and a lot of elections will be very tight. How much either side wins or looses seats is really unpredictable at this point.
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is not to respond to them at all. Let them just run amok. They will be the author’s of their own misery
I’m sick of feeling that I have to go into the site armored to the gills just to find a reasonable person to discuss the issues in a thoughtful manner. Sirota writes great stuff, so does booman and a whole host of others.
On the Hill, what Fowler has done is considered smart career positioning. She is being rewarded for it. I find it distasteful.
I suspect that a major rationale for the deal was the size of the employment market taken up by the health insurance industry. It’s a big sector, and it’s a lot of jobs. Note that I used the word rationale, not reason — after all, you can rationalize anything in this world — because the new agency infrastructure would easily absorb that workforce and still have opne slots left over.
I’d like to say I don’t know what to think about this administration anymore, but I actually do. I think that Obama came in well-intentioned, and then was told how the game would be played. That’s probably a naive perspective, but it does have the virtue of keeping me from feeling used.