Hard to argue with
This is hard to argue with, Krugman, My Obama Problem.
John Boehner, March 2009:
It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it
Barack Obama, yesterday:
“At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said. “
We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.
Either is this, The revolving door spins faster on health care reform.
Beginning in 2001, Liz Fowler was the Chief Counsel for the Senate Finance Committee in charge of health and entitlement issues, i.e., legislation that primarily affected the health care industry. As her own biography boasts:
In this capacity, she was responsible for overseeing health policy issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction, including Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, health tax issues and initiatives to provide health coverage for the uninsured. She played a key role in the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA).
Her work in that government position on health care was apparently quite pleasing to the health care industry because, in 2006, she was hired by the health care giant WellPoint to serve as its Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs — in other words, overseeing WellPoint’s lobbying and other government-influencing activities. Then, in 2008, once it was likely that there would be a Democratic President and thus a new, massive health care bill enacted, Fowler left WellPoint and returned to the Senate, as top aide to Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee Chairman who would oversee the drafting of the health care bill (Baucus’s previous top health care aide, Michelle Easton, a former PhRMA official, left to become a lobbyist for the health care industry). Now, as David Sirota noted last night, Fowler has a brand new job, as reported by The Billings Gazette:
Liz Fowler, a key staffer for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus who helped draft the federal health reform bill enacted in March, is joining the Obama administration to help implement the new law.
Fowler, chief health counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, will become deputy director of the Office of Consumer Information and Oversight at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In other words, implementation of the massive health care bill just enacted by the Congress will be overseen by a former high-level executive of the nation’s largest private health insurer. As Marcy Wheeler writes: ”It’s a nice trick: send your VP to write a law mandating that the middle class buy shitty products like yours, then watch that VP move into the executive branch to ‘oversee’ the implementation of the law.” Indeed, Fowler played a crucial role in shaping the health care bill to ensure there was no public option and to compel every single American to purchase the products of the private health care industry (including those of her former employer). As Politico put it last year: ”If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer.” It was Fowler who was literally writing the health care bills for Baucus which, at least at the time, progressives found so objectionable.
