The Best Entourage $263.4 Million of Lobbying Money Can Buy

by Tim Foley

categories: For Profit Insurance, Obama and Congress

Published August 14, 2009 @ 11:01PM PT

An optimist sees the glass as half-full.  A pessimist sees the glass, sees the water, and begins to wonder how it got there, who paid for the service, and what favor they’re going to expect in return.  According to Bloomberg, the amount of money and staff supplied by the health care industries over the past six months is an order of magnitude larger than either those industries’ campaign contributions to politicians or their advertising budgets.  The most colorful statistic is that there are six industry lobbyists for every member of Congress.  If you’re a legislator working on health care reform, your life might have begun to resemble a Washington DC version of Entourage.

President Obama rode into town declaring that the era of special interests and lobbyists standing in the way of progress is over.  Apparently, Congress didn’t get the memo, and the health care industry flat-out ignored it.  The numbers are gaudy.  $263.4 million in lobbying alone in the past six months.  $20.5 million in political contributions to, yes, both political parties, including over $382,000 for Majority Leader Harry Reid. $320,000 for a Ferrari for Turtle, and an extra $100,000 so Kanye West’s entourage could all be wearing designer outfits.  OK, I made that last sentence up.  But there’s no doubt that in a year of reform, the industry that makes money off the system is livin’ large down by the Potomac.

The problem is less intrinsically the practice of lobbying and more the extreme concentration on the single issue health care.  The number of registered lobbyists working for the health care industries now beats both the defense industry and the oil and gas companies -- no mean feat!  With that "shock and awe" exposure, troubling questions arise.  After all, if throughout your day you were trailed by a salesman who was regularly reminded you of how great a beverage Coca-Cola was and how cheap it was, and occasionally handed you surveys comparing how happy people were to drink Coke vs. water, after a few days or maybe even a few hours, you might start to think, “You know, I am kind of thirsty…”  You can count as “thirsty” such legislators as the House Blue Dogs and Sen. Kent Conrad, who were both mentioned by name in the Business Week article on how well UnitedHealth has protected the interests of the health insurance industry.  You can probably add Sen. Max Baucus, whose staff, we’re told, “rotates weekly meetings among the various groups in the health-care debate, providers one week, purchasers a second, consumers a third.”  And sadly, you can even add the White House to that list, as evinced by the leaked details of their deal to insulate the pharmaceutical industry from future negotiations for savings in exchange for their full-throated and well-funded campaign in support of health reform.  (Although no one quite knows how far-reaching, binding or damaging to reform efforts that deal is, at this point.)

Many people see the provisions in the reform bill as taking it too easy on those industries that make big bucks off our health care system being so dysfunctional.  There may be many reasons for this – balkiness at what could be perceived as a high price tag, an attempt to appeal to moderate Republicans, or honest concerns with the measures.  But you can’t entirely discount the effect of an entire basketball team playing zone defense on every single one of our elected representatives.

(Photo credit:  Ethan Bloch on Flickr.)