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Roll Call has crunched the numbers and come up with a truly eye-popping figure of $876 million spent by medical interests lobbying Congress during the health care fight:
Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed the sweeping overhaul.
Those stakeholders, including the drug industry, doctors, hospitals and manufacturers of medical products, were responsible for one out of every five dollars doled out on lobbying during that period, according to a CQ MoneyLine analysis of lobbying disclosure reports filed with Congress.
After watching the health care reform fight, I can assure you that the money was well spent. Proper reform that would have provided for true universal health care and brought our health care costs down to a level similar to the rest of the industrialized world would have reduced the revenues of many health care industries by roughly 20-50%.
Just take, for example, the drug makers and their powerful association, PhRMA. They spent $253 million on the health care fight according to the article. As a result, they managed to keep out drug re-importation and direct Medicare drug price negotiation, and were able to add very long exclusivity periods for biologics. A very conservative estimate would be that any of these three changes alone would have saved the government and consumers–in other words, cost the drug makers–$100 billion over the next decade. You could safely conclude that the drug makers will probably get roughly 100,000% return on their lobbying investment.
If you don’t think corporate money has a corrosive effect on our politics and public policy, the medical industrial complex has successfully placed a nearly billion-dollar bet that you are wrong.
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100,000%
Color me Green with a pitchfork!
Jesus, over 3/4 billion dollars on lobbying. Imagine what that much money could have been used for instead in a functional health care system simply providing access to services. And to see such a sum spent on lobbying – it begs the question “Where did they get all this money to spend?” The answer: profits. What this means is that, by formally embracing the health insurance and pharmaceutical cartels in law, the Federal government has provided them with a mechanism through which the cartels can generate yet more money to lobby their interests in DC.
What a broken system!
To give you an idea that would cover the cost of providing private insurance for 67,400 families
Obviously corruption isn’t cheap.
Will this be reported on the corporate nightly news shows or will the internets be the only ones in the know?
Plutocracy rules! All hail plutonomy! The way the US runs in the age of stupid
Mandate, baby, mandate!
They got a damned good one for their money! A few tinkers in the area of patient rights in exchange for 30 million new, coerced customers.
We all know the corporations have too much influence, the question is what to do about it?
Sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off just dropping out of the system all together. Find some little island somewhere and doing just what I need to get by.
I had hope that the corrupt system that we have in place now would change with the election of BO. But we all know that hasn’t happened.
I guess I’m just tired of getting fucked over
Jason Rosenbaum, paging Jason Rosenbaum; you left the barn door open in your quest to reign in insurers.
Blue Texan’s regularly scheduled post is available: Sarah Palin’s Response to the Gulf of Mexico Disaster: Shilling for Big Oil
I would argue that a 1000-fold return on your investment demonstrates that corruption IS cheap.
Plainly the WashingtonDC Lobby Industry thrived during Obama’s HCR 2009 Shake the Campaign Money Tree Democrtic Party Funds Drive.
Once again — who cut the insider deals with AHIP and PhRMA? Obama did.
Now of course a year later going into 2010 mid-term elections the Democrats and their leader,Barack Obama,will proceed to blame this crippled HCR outcome on the Republicans. The Obamabots will gladly drink this Kool-Aid. While others like Jon Walker continue to present the real details of how Barack Obama betrayed us so he and his party could get some more $$. Thanks Jon for your outstanding work and effort.
It is reasonable to suggest American healthcare while based on grossly perverse money politics and health care done for massive profits premise is headed for a big crash and burn. Sooner than later.
Barack Obama? He appears to know or have little or no shame in having let this happen.
$876 million dollars this round. One can expect more money to be shaken out of AHIP/PhARMA and their allied interests before 2014 gets here.
This so called “reform” was not about better healthcare. It was about politicians raking in $$ and the current American healthcare regime getting more profits.
Smile all you want Barack Obama.You own this outcome. What a fraud.
This was just a rerun on steroids of the 1993-94 fiasco … except this time, Democrats learned to roll with the industry. Their rewards will never be calculated accurately, but legislators, staffers, White House policy wonks, their kinfolk and friends, will benefit personally from their ‘cooperation’. Change They Can Believe In would be for the field army of Progressives to sit on their hands in the next few elections … because while the GOP is shaking down Wall Street et. al. (and feigning disgust at financial reform), the Dems are equally culpable for selling out the public interest.
There is only one surprise here … that the vast majority of Progressives are still so naive. The non-surprise is that legions of Tea Partiers have been so thoroughly misled and confused that they are out in force pounding away for the special interests, which are killing them softly.
I’d like to know how much of it went to Repubs or Dems and to whom. It’s a too common practice to criticize congress as if it’s one party or person.
The Republicans and Democrats effectively act as one party – the Republicans are more honest about their corporatism while the Democrats put on a bigger act, but they both do the same thing.
Typo in title: “Heath Care”. Prolly needs an “L” somewhere in there.
[Mod Note: Fixed. Thank You]
“What a broken system!”
Broken for whom? It seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship for the parties involved. The voting taxpayer is simply not a player in this game.
Medicare-for-all *IS* a jobs bill!
Actually, we can get a “two-fer” by voting in a single-payer Medicare-for-all system. It is both the best health care proposal of them all, and a jobs bill wrapped into one.
So good, in fact, that the US Senate refused to even allow it on the table because the insurance industry objected to the tune of $46 million in campaign bribes. It would eliminate the cash they are now putting into the bank for profits and bonuses.
It’s both funny and sad that you can tell how good a bill is by the amount of political cash needed to block it. But our congress doesn’t come cheap.
Medicare-for-all…
Bottom line: For the same amount of dollars we are spending today (17% of GDP) we could provide first-class Cheney-care to 100% of our population. Including those on Medicaid, SCHIP, worker’s comp, and those who are unemployed, uninsured and under-insured.
We’d eliminate the 31% of insurance bureaucracy waste (reduce hospital and clinic billing clerks, eliminate exorbitant CEO salaries and bonuses, actuarial and denial costs, gatekeepers, broker commissions, rising shareholder profits, and even the political contributions that allow the politicians to share in the system).
We’d spend that money on healthcare instead.
Actually, we’d save $400 billion if we did nothing else, but that savings has already been earmarked for expanding the system to include limited vision and dental. Yet it still allows people to buy additional Gap coverage on the outside for things Medicare doesn’t cover, like cosmetic surgery.
We’d pay for the system the same way other countries do, through our national infrastructure… about 2% on individual taxes and 8% on company wages (as opposed to the 15% they pay today for insurance premiums). But other forms can be established, like a value added tax (VAT) on imported product. (How’s that for returning American jobs?)
… it *IS* a jobs bill!
Employers now spend an average 15% of wages on health care benefits, which they pass on to the consumer at the cash register.
But this new Medicare-for-all system benefits only US manufacturers, and makes them more competitive with product from countries already with universal health care. The Big Three already make more cars in Ontario than the US because their health costs are $800 per employee there versus $6500 here.
The 15% of wages saved can instead be spent on adding new technologies and new jobs. Businesses could spend the savings on keeping jobs in the US instead of outsourcing to other countries. That’s a bailout for 100% of our businesses, not just the banks and car manufacturers.
Call it socialized medicine if you will, but it’s not. Medicare is the strongest public-private system ever and uses the same private doctors and hospitals we’ve always used. It’s just a more efficient way of paying them, and it is already in place and we need only merge in the younger and less expensive population.
The problem, of course, is that the expenses and waste that could be and should be cut, are somebody else’s profits. And the politicians don’t like that a bit because they get a piece of them.
Though if Wisconsin must go it alone, with something like Healthy Wisconsin, we’d attract companies and jobs to the state. With $1.5 million per year our politicians get from the insurance industry, however, let’s hope our Pols disregard the dollars for the citizenry.
Source: http://moneyedpoliticians.net/2010/02/19/medicare-for-all-is-a-jobs-bill/
[Mod Note: For comments of this length and depth, we do recommend posting to a diary at The Seminal. And do please limit the personal blog advertising to one per day]
“…the Republicans are more honest about their
corporatismcorruption while the Democrats put on a bigger act,….”Exactly.
Bait and switch: How the “public option” was sold
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%E2%80%9Cpublic-option%E2%80%9D-was-sold/