Ezra Klein, one of the top-ten bloggers/reporters on the health-care debate last year, makes an interesting point over at the Washington Post about the $648 million on lobbying that health-care companies spent last year:
That’s an absurdly low number given the sums involved. In 2018, for instance, the health-care bill is projected to spend about $175 billion. Here’s how that compares to the money spent shaping the bill in 2009.
It’s about one-third of 1 percent of the bill’s projected spending in 2018. And the bill will spend even more than $175 billion in 2019. The year after that, it will spend even more. The year after that? Even more. And so on into the future.
Klein suggests a handful of possible answers, but I’ve got one more: campaign finance regulations and restrictions on political communications (such as those struck down by the Citizens United ruling) create something of a bottle neck that make it difficult to cram tons of money into lobbying in a year — it seems nine or ten figures is all an industry can muster in 12 months.
But does that speak in favor of campaign finance and political speech regulations? Not really, because as Klein concedes, Howard Dean has said, and as I’ve written all year, the big drugmakers and insurers still managed to hijack the bill. It seems the primary effect of campaign finance regulation is to lower the asking price of profitable legislation.
