After all the triumphal talk by Democrats and liberal bloggers about bringing industry on board with their “reform,” (Yglesias, Emanuel, Klein, for a small sample) you would think liberal writers looking to attack conservatives would have to drop that hoary “our opponents are just shills for industry” line. But then you’d run into Jonathan Chait of the New Republic.
Chait has an article dedicated to picking apart conservative and Republican arguments about health care, and he says these arguments usually rest on opposition to “big government.” Then he rolls out the tired shill attack:
But opposing “big government” can mean different things. Does it mean opposition to regulation? To spending? To the direct funding of public services as opposed to via private sector middlemen? The Republican Party and its ideological allies have defined it increasingly as whatever suits the profitability of the health care industry.
Really? I hate to sound like a broken record, but the factually backwards conventional wisdom is so persistent that the rebuttal bears repeating.
Conservatives and many Republicans opposed the massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan, while the health insurers, drugmakers, and American Hospital Association sided with the Democrats and liberals on this one. It’s not hard to guess why? Forcing taxpayers to subsidize more people’s health insurance just widens the pipelines from taxpayers to insurers, drugmakers, and hospitals.
Conservatives object to the big government plan to force us all to buy health insurance (the “individual mandate”). It doesn’t take too much economic savviness to see this is (a) big government, (b) profitable to insurers. Sure enough, the insurers have lobbied hard for this.
Then Chait descends further into the realm of demonstrably untrue:
It’s not that every conservative apparatchik is walking around Washington toting a suitcase of Pharma cash and a conspiratorial grin. Intellectual corruption doesn’t work that way. The health care industry has spent vast sums to influence politicians and opinion leaders, mostly on the right.
First of all, who actually is “walking around Washington toting a suitcase of Pharma cash”? That would be Barack Obama, who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics pocketed $2 million from the industry in his election. If you want to equal that sum in pharma gifts to Republicans in 2008, you have to add together the top 6 GOP recipients–and that includes Arlen Specter and Mitt “individual mandate” Romney.
Second, Chait writes “The health care industry has spent vast sums to influence politicians and opinion leaders, mostly on the right.” That used to be true, but not recently. The CRP shows that in the last election cycle, the health industry gave 34% more to Democratic congressional candidates than to Republican candidates. Obama outraised McCain from this sector $19.6 million to $7.4 million (and Romney, again, was the No. 2 Republican).
[update: Michael Cannon at Cato has a more thorough fisking of Chait here.]
