A whole lot of money is being spent in an attempt to derail true healthcare reform and maintain the untenable status quo.
This is the grim reality from a report released today by Common Cause. The special interests, all aligned against the urgent needs of the American people, are spending $1.4 million a day so that they will prevail and we won't.
Key findings of the Common Cause report include:
• Health industries – including health insurance, pharmaceuticals and health products, hospitals and HMOs, and health professionals – have contributed over $372 million in campaign contributions to members of Congress since 2000.
• Political spending by the health industries has increased 73 percent since 2000. Health interests contributed about $94 million to candidates for Congress in the 2008 election cycle, up from about $54 million in the 2000 cycle.
• Members serving on committees and subcommittees with jurisdiction over health care reform in the House and Senate received the lion's share of health industries' largesse. Committee members raised $178 million from the industries this decade – roughly half of the industries' contributions to the entire Congress. Since 2000, the House members sitting on health committees have raised twice as much money from the health industry per election cycle as non-committee members (an average of 171,000 compared to 87,000), and the average House member on a key health subcommittee hauled in three times as much per cycle ($269,000). Senators with plum committee posts also enjoy sizable fundraising advantages.
• The industries engage in "switch-hitting" – shifting campaign contributions between Democrats and Republicans to win access with the party in power. In 2000, with Republicans controlling the House and a closely-divided Senate, Republicans on health-related committees received more than double what Democrats received (68 percent to 32 percent) from the health industries. In 2008, with Democrats controlling both the House and Senate, over 61 percent of the industries' contributions to committee members went to the majority Democrats and just 39 percent went to Republicans.
• The major health interests have spent an average of $1.4 million per day to lobby Congress so far this year and are on track to spend more than half a billion dollars by the end 2009. That comes out to about $2,600 per day per member of the House and Senate. The pharmaceutical lobby alone spent $733,000 per day in the first quarter of 2009. Since 2000, the industries have spent over $3 billion on lobbying, with the total increasing every year and rising more than 142 percent over the course of the decade. In each of the past four years health interests have been the number-one lobbying force in Washington, measured in expenditures, and have averaged over $1 million per day.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg!
There's also the spectacle of what I would call a medical-industrial congressional employment office. While the rest of us go to work every day wondering whether today will be the day we get the pink slip, CQ Politics reports that the medical-industrial complex seems to be an employer of choice for congressional spouses.
Nearly four dozen members of Congress have spouses employed in the health care industry — ties that lawmakers acknowledge are influencing their thinking about how the health system should be overhauled.
Financial disclosure forms made public in mid-June showed that at least 39 members were tied to the industry by their spouses in 2008. In addition, 13 full-voting House members are medical doctors.
Paul Krugman is worried. His blog post this morning in The Conscience of a Liberal, was titled, Obama messes up on healthcare, big time. Krugman's take home message, you and I will have to drag healthcare reform over the finish line, or it will die an ignoble death.
My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn't understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.
. . . Maybe there's a way to recover from this. But it's up to the health reform activists to stiffen the administration's spine. Obama may be satisfied with "broad parameters" — but the rest of us aren't, and have to make that known.
I don't blame Krugman for be scared--and angry.
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