Below is an article by Bill Moyers and JOURNAL senior writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments.
See also News Dissector

"In Washington, Revolving Doors are Bad for Your Health"
By Bill Moyers & Michael Winship
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On Tuesday, October 13, the Senate Finance Committee finally is scheduled to vote on its version of health care insurance reform. And therein lies yet another story in the endless saga of money and politics.

In most polls, the majority of Americans favor a non-profit alternative -- like Medicare -- that would give the private health industry some competition. So if so many of us, including President Obama himself, want that public option, how come we're not getting one?

Because the medicine that could cure our healthcare nightmare has been poisoned from Day One – fatally adulterated, thanks to the infamous, Washington revolving door. Movers and shakers rotate between government and the private sector at a speed so dizzying they forget for whom they’re supposed to be working.

If you’ve been watching the Senate Finance Committee’s markup sessions, maybe you’ve noticed a woman sitting behind Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Her name is Liz Fowler.

Fowler used to work for WellPoint, the largest health insurer in the country. She was its vice president of public policy. Baucus’ office failed to mention this in the press release announcing her appointment as senior counsel in February 2008, even though it went on at length about her expertise in “health care policy.”

Now she’s working for the very committee with the most power to give her old company and the entire industry exactly what they want – higher profits – and no competition from alternative non-profit coverage that could lower costs and premiums.

A veteran of the revolving door, Fowler had a previous stint working for Senator Baucus – before her time at WellPoint. But wait, there’s more. The person who was Baucus top health advisor before he brought back Liz Fowler? Her name is Michelle Easton. And why did she leave the staff of the committee? To go to work – surprise – at a firm representing the same company for which Liz Fowler worked – WellPoint. As a lobbyist.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard in the old Washington shell game. Lobbyist out, lobbyist in. It’s why they always win. They’ve been plowing this ground for years, but with the broad legislative agenda of the Obama White House – health care, energy, financial reform, the Employee Free Choice Act and more – the soil has never been so fertile.

The health care industry alone has six lobbyists for every member of Congress and more than 500 of them are former Congressional staff members, according to the Public Accountability Initiative’s LittleSis database.

Just to be certain Congress sticks with the program, the industry has been showering megabucks all over Capitol Hill. From the beginning, they wanted to make sure that whatever bill comes out of the Finance Committee puts for-profit insurance companies first -- by forcing the uninsured to buy medical policies from them. Money not only talks, it writes the prescriptions.

In just the last few months, the health care industry has spent $380 million on lobbying, advertising and campaign contributions. And -- don’t bother holding onto your socks -- a million and a half of it went to Finance Committee Chairman Baucus, the man who said he saw “a lot to like” in the two public option amendments proposed by Senators Rockefeller and Schumer, but voted no anyway.

The people in favor of a public alternative can’t scrape up the millions of dollars Baucus has received from the health sector during his political career. In fact, over the last two decades, the current members of the entire finance committee have collected nearly $50 million from the health sector, a long-term investment that’s now paying off like a busted slot machine.

Not that we should be surprised. A century ago, muckraking journalists reported that large corporations and other wealthy interests virtually owned the United States Senate – using bribery, fraud and sometimes blackmail to get their way. Jokes were made about “the Senator from Union Pacific” or “the Senator from Standard Oil.”

One reporter in particular was out to break their grip. His name was David Graham Phillips. One day in 1906, readers of Cosmopolitan Magazine opened its March issue to discover the first of nine articles by Phillips titled, “The Treason of the Senate.”

He wrote, “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous: interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom.”

The public outrage provoked by Phillips and other muckrakers contributed to the ratification of the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct popular election of senators, who until then were elected by easily bought-off state legislators.

Of course, like water seeking its own level, big money finds its way around every obstacle, and was soon up to its old tricks, filling the pockets of sympathetic and grateful politicians.

Today, none dare call it treason. So why not call it what it is – a friendly takeover of government, a leveraged buyout of democracy.

Outrageous? You bet. But don’t just get mad. Get busy.

America's Healthy Future Act and Related Links

Posted on September 25, 2009
Wellpoint "really did" write the Baucus health plan
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Three articles on the connection between Sen. Max Baucus and three current and former Wellpoint executives/lobbyists, Liz Fowler, Stephen Northrup, and Michelle Easton.
The Max Baucus WellPoint/Liz Fowler Plan

By: emptywheel
Tuesday September 8, 2009

All this time I’ve been calling Max Tax health care Max Baucus’ health care plan.

But, as William Ockham points out, it’s actually Liz Fowler’s health care plan (if you open the document and look under document properties, it lists her as author). At one level, it’s not surprising that Bad Max’s Senior Counsel would have authored the Max Tax plan. Here’s how Politico described her role in Bad Max’s health care plan earlier this year:

If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer.

As a senior aide to Baucus, she directs the Finance Committee health care staff, enforces deadlines on drafting bill language and coordinates with the White House and other lawmakers. She also troubleshoots, identifying policy and political problems before they ripen.

“My job is to get from point A to point B,” said Fowler, who’s training for four triathlons this summer in between her long days on Capitol Hill.

Fowler learned as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania that the United States was the only industrialized country without universal health care, and she decided then to dedicate her professional life to the work.

She first worked for Baucus from 2001 through 2005, playing a key role in negotiating the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. Feeling burned out, she left for the private sector but rejoined Baucus in 2008, sensing that a Democratic-controlled Congress would make progress on overhauling the health care system.

Baucus and Fowler spent a year putting the senator in a position to pursue reform, including holding hearings last summer and issuing a white paper in November. They deliberately avoided releasing legislation in order to send a signal of openness and avoid early attacks.

“People know when Liz is speaking, she is speaking for Baucus,” said Dean Rosen, the health policy adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

What neither Politico nor Bad Max himself want you to know, though, is that in the two years before she came back to the Senate to help Max craft the Max Tax plan, she worked as VP for Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint.

So to the extent that Liz Fowler is the Author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/09/08/liz-fowlers-plan/

Chief health aide to Baucus is former Wellpoint executive
By Kevin Connor, Eyes on the Ties Blog, Sep 01, 2009 at 09:32 EST

Senator Max Baucus’s chief health adviser, Elizabeth Fowler, has been called the “chief operating officer” of the healthcare reform process by Politico — the staffer who sets legislative deadlines, coordinates with the White House on policy, and is understood to speak for Baucus on health policy issues. Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein has called her the most influential health staffer in the Senate.

Fowler, as it turns out, is also fresh off a lucrative stint working for the insurance industry: from 2006 to 2008, she was VP of public policy for Wellpoint, the insurance giant.

That’s right, an insurance industry hack is the quiet name directing the healthcare reform process on Capitol Hill.

It gets worse. Baucus’s chief health advisor prior to Fowler, Michelle Easton, currently lobbies for Wellpoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, & Young.

Fowler worked for Baucus as chief health aide from 2001 to 2005, as well. The revolving door is spinning so fast, in this particular case, that it’s hard to tell whether Baucus prefers hiring directly from Wellpoint, or vice versa (or maybe they use the same headhunter?).

These ties were uncovered through our project with citizen journalists at the Huffington Post Investigative, which aimed to track down Congressional staffers-turned-healthcare lobbyists. We’re in the process of wrapping up the project, which so far has identified 450 staffers-turned-lobbyists. Analyst @sundin was the first to notice Easton’s trips from Capitol Hill to K Street and back.

Klein and the Politico both failed to mention Fowler’s insurance industry ties, while hailing her as an important figure in the healthcare reform process. The Politico mentioned her time in the private sector without getting into specifics, and Klein called her hiring by Baucus reason for hope, without mentioning where she was hired from.

Whatever the reason for the omissions, it’s a good illustration of why LittleSis matters, and why research projects like this one will play an important role in the emerging news ecosystem.

We’ll have more on the dynamic duo at the Baucus-Wellpoint nexus, and potential policy implications, over the next week.

http://blog.littlesis.org/2009/09/01/chief-health-aide-to-baucus-is-former-wellpoint-executive/

Wellpoint lobbyist & ex-Enzi staffer wrote key parts of Baucus plan

By Kevin Connor
Eyes on the Ties Blog
Sep 11, 2009 at 10:32 EST

Still more evidence that Wellpoint wrote the Baucus plan: the insurance company’s lobbying efforts in DC are headed up by Senator Mike Enzi’s former chief health adviser at Senate HELP, Stephen Northrup. Enzi is a member of Baucus’s so-called “Gang of Six” shaping the bipartisan compromise bill.

In fact, key provisions in the Baucus plan apparently draw on industry-inspired legislation first introduced by Enzi in 2006, while Northrup was still his chief health aide.

Consumer Watchdog first called attention to the similarities, particularly with respect to a part of the plan that would help insurance companies avoid state regulation:

The plan would result in a “race to the bottom” in health care regulation by allowing insurance companies that participate in “health care compacts” to choose the weakest state law to govern all their policies, regardless of which state the policies are sold in. Currently, insurance companies must abide by the state laws of any state where they sell insurance. The Baucus plan resembles an industry proposal carried by Mike Enzi (R-WY) in 2006 discussed below.

So this bill really did get written by insurance industry VPs — past and present. Liz Fowler, the current Baucus staffer who wrote the plan, was a Wellpoint executive last year. And Northrup, the former Enzi staffer who wrote the original iteration of this bill, is now on the Wellpoint payroll.

Northrup, who is on the growing LittleSis list of Congressional staffers-turned-healthcare lobbyists, was Enzi’s chief health aide from 2003 to 2006. He joined Wellpoint as vice president of federal affairs in Washington in 2007, and is “responsible for leading WellPoint’s advocacy efforts before Congress and various federal government agencies,” according to Modern Healthcare.

Northrup had been through the revolving door before, joining Enzi’s staff after serving as executive director of the Long Term Care Pharmacy Alliance — just in time to help craft Part D, the Medicare reform widely considered a giveaway to pharmaceutical interests.

Even the trigger-shy White House has spoken out against Enzi, who has established himself as the most recalcitrant member of the Gang of Six (with Grassley a close second). There has been some question about whether the group would hold together, given the pair’s apparent unwillingness to compromise. But again and again, the gang has stuck together. On Wednesday, MSNBC reported that Grassley and Enzi were still at table.

Revolving door for health care aides
By: Manu Raju, September 15, 2009 04:42 AM EST
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Some of the most influential aides in the closed-door Senate Finance Committee negotiations over health care reform have ties to interests that would be directly affected by the legislation.

Before she was hired last year as senior counsel to Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Liz Fowler worked as a highly paid public policy adviser for WellPoint Inc., the nation’s largest publicly traded health benefits company.

Mark Hayes, health policy director and chief health counsel for Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is married to a registered lobbyist for a firm that represents drug companies and hospital groups, although the couple says she doesn’t lobby Grassley’s office.

Frederick Isasi, a health policy adviser to Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), was a registered lobbyist at Powell Goldstein, where his clients included public hospitals and the American Stroke Association.

Kate Spaziani, senior health policy aide to Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), was also a registered lobbyist at Powell Goldstein, although Conrad’s office says she worked as a lawyer — not as a lobbyist — for public hospitals on Medicare issues.

There’s no evidence that the aides’ ties have shaped the bill that Baucus hopes to release Tuesday, and the ultimate decisions over its provisions rest with the senators themselves. But critics say the involvement of such well-connected insiders could lead to dangerous conflicts.

“It raises the concerns about the revolving door that have always been present,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that tracks influence in politics. “This just brings it into the fore because it’s such a far-reaching bill.”

The revolving door swings both ways in the health care debate — and the Finance Committee isn’t the only place where it stops.

All across Capitol Hill, a number of former lobbyists, consultants and advisers for firms that represent consumers, patients, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers are now in key positions in the House and Senate, according to a review of public records.

Mark Childress, a senior attorney on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee who was a high-level official in the Clinton White House and an aide to former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), was a partner at the law firm Foley Hoag, working in the government-relations department there before joining the HELP staff last spring.

Kathleen Kerrigan was a tax lobbyist at the firm Baker & Hostetler until February 2005 and is now advising Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on the tax issues in the debates over health care and other matters.

And according to the group Public Accountability Initiative, which tracks politicians’ ties to various interests, more than 500 former congressional aides have gone on to become health care lobbyists.

Both lobbyists-turned-aides and aides-turned-lobbyists say they offer unique expertise and experience as lawmakers try to rewrite the nation’s health care laws.

“It gave me a very different perspective, leaving the Hill,” said Debbie Curtis, who spent two years as a lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Consumer Action during the Clinton-era health care debate. Curtis is currently the chief of staff for Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), the chairman of the powerful health subcommittee on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Asked if the revolving door creates a problem, David Wenhold, president of the American League of Lobbyists, said, “Absolutely not,” adding that “most lobbyists are subject-matter experts in their areas.”

Indeed, Fowler — by several accounts the most important aide in the Gang of Six negotiations — is a seasoned veteran who has worked in a variety of areas in the health policy field.

“Liz Fowler is a smart and talented individual and one of the brightest health care minds in the Senate, and she and the Finance Committee staff have been working day and night to help achieve this goal” of crafting a health care bill to lower costs and provide affordable coverage, said Scott Mulhauser, spokesman for Baucus. “Sen. Baucus has served in the Senate for more than 30 years, and the only factor that influences his decisions and the decisions of his staff is whether a policy is right for his state and for the American people. Period.”

But when Baucus’s office announced in early 2008 that it was hiring Fowler, it didn’t exactly advertise that she’d been on the payroll of a massive health benefits firm. Baucus’s press release cited Fowler’s prior experience in his office and on the staff of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) as well as her work for a private law firm. It didn’t mention her most recent work for WellPoint, where she was not a registered lobbyist but served as an adviser.

WellPoint spokeswoman Cheryl Leamon said that the company does not “see it as an advantage” to have Fowler participating in the Gang of Six negotiations.

“It’s not unusual for a policy expert to go back and forth between the public and private sectors,” she said.

Hayes — the Grassley aide whose wife represents the American Board of Internal Medicine and other clients as a lobbyist for Jennings Policy Strategies — said he and his lobbyist wife have taken steps to prevent any possible conflicts of interest. Katherine Hayes, a onetime Senate aide, does not contact Grassley’s staff while working on behalf of her clients.

“As far as health care policy generally, there’s not much we agree on, so we don’t even like talking about it,” Mark Hayes said