House Republicans say evidence is emerging to suggest that the Obama administration and Senate Democrats may have bought off the pharmaceuticals industry to keep it from blocking the passage of Obamacare.
A memo distributed by House Energy and Commerce Committee to members Wednesday suggests that PhRMA, the industry’s lobby group, struck a secret deal with the Democratic-controlled Senate Finance Committee and the Obama White House and notes that it is under investigation.
PhRMA played a key role in ensuring that Hillary Clinton’s 1994 health care reform plan was dead on arrival with a nationwide ad campaign featuring a fictitious couple, “Harry and Louise.”
Hence the administration knew that it needed the pharmaceuticals lobby’s support to prevent a repeat.
And interestingly this same couple conveniently was sold on Obamacare in ad the lobby produced in 2009.
White House involvement was confirmed in an email obtained by the committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations from former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, who previously served as a staffer for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus.
“What the hell? That wasn’t part of our deal,” Messina wrote in an email about a prior correspondence from PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin.
The committee staff reports that then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel played an active role in the negotiations and that the House of Representatives was shut out of the negotiations because of political calculations.
“….[M]aybe we would have never gotten anywhere if we had,” Obama Office of Health Reform Director Nancy Ann DeParle wrote in an email to a PhRMA representative obtained by the committee.
The committee wants to find out what the White House got out of the deal and what was kept from the House of Representatives and from the public.
But one thing is for sure, Senate Democrats were paid handsomely by the lobby in the aftermath of Obamacare.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, the normally Republican-aligned lobby flipped its loyalties and went with the Senate Democrats in 2010. In 2008 the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee was the second largest recipient of PhRMA’s campaign cash, getting $200,000. But the lobby made the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee its largest single recipient of campaign cash to the tune of $150,000 in the 2010 post-Obamacare election cycle.
PhRMA repaid Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for ramming Obamacare through the Senate by placing him among its top recipients of campaign cash for the only time since he was first elected in 1986.
Not only that. The lobby made the Nevada State Democratic Party the third largest recipient of its largesse in 2010, which amounted to an indirect payment to Reid because the party devoted most of its efforts to beating back Sharron Angle’s Tea Party-backed effort to oust him.
And the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney reported in July 2010 that PhRMA backed an ad campaign urging voters to “call Harry Reid today; tell him to keep fighting for Nevada families.”
Carney notes that the health care bill did one thing – pad industry profits.
