President Obama spent the first 16 months of his presidency pretending to fight the health-care industry. “For those who fight reform in order to profit financially or politically from the status quo,” the White House website blared in 2009, “the president sends a simple message: ‘Not this time.'” When the Senate passed the health-care bill, he thanked the upper chamber “for standing up to the special interests.”
This was all hogwash. The industry that spent more on lobbying than any other in 2009 was the drug industry, and that industry backed the bill, and rewarded Senate Democrats by running ads in support of them. The bill subsidizes the heck out of drugmakers, doctors, hospitals, and other providers. Insurers dislike a lot of the bill, but they’re fighting to save it from conservatives — after all, the law REQUIRES PEOPLE TO BUY THEIR PRODUCT.
So, unlike Chris Frates at National Journal, I’m not surprised by this news:
Obama outperformed both Romney and Perry among drug industry interests, bringing in $230,000 compared to Romney’s $161,000 and Perry’s $43,000. And even among insurers, who Obama used as a political punching bag throughout the debate, Obama holds his own, bringing in only $20,000 less than Romney’s $111,000 total, according to CRP.
Here’s Frates’s explanation:
The industry is hedging its bets. The Obama administration still has a mountain of regulations to implement and trade associations and companies don’t want to alienate an administration that holds huge sway over their bottom lines.
“There’s an old adage that fear equals funding and there’s still a lot of fear about where this administration is heading so there’s still a level of giving that’s commensurate to the level of access they want,” said a health care insider. “These are not thank you notes.”
I’ve got a simpler explanation: the industries that endorsed this bill don’t actually hate the law.
