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Liz Fowler with Sen. Max Baucus.
If you had to pick someone on the Democratic side to be the poster child for the revolving door problem, it would be hard to find someone better than Elizabeth Fowler.
She worked for the Senate Finance Committee back in 2003 when it helped write the Medicare prescription drug program. The program helped needlessly enrich private insurance companies by requiring the government use them as completely useless middlemen. Her reward was getting a very high paying job at Wellpoint, one of the insurance companies that so needlessly benefited by the law she worked.
Fowler then returned through the revolving to work for Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) while he crafted the Affordable Care Act. Baucus made sure the health care law stuck to the deal President Obama made with the Pharmaceutical lobby. In exchange for the industry supporting the new law, Democrats agreed to break their promise to implement drug re-importation and direct Medicare drug price negotiation. This deal protected billions of government waste that went to the drug companies. Fowler left Baucus’s office to briefly work for the Department of Health and Human Services on implementing the law. Now, less than a year before the law will be implemented, Politico is reporting that Fowler has taken a high paying job at Johnson & Johnson’s, one of the drug companies helped significantly by the law she worked on.
Fowler has not once, but twice, worked on an important piece of legislation only to soon after take a top job at one of the companies that most significantly benefited from the laws she helped write. There are few people for whom the revolving door has spun more quickly and powerfully.
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Yep wrote the bill for the pill people and then goes to work from them. Just more of that hopism and changey thing 0 talks about.
Everything is on schedule, please move along.
Just think: the Rube Goldberg Health Insurance “Reform” Act of 2010 was the biggest achievement of the underachieving Obama presidency.
Obama is starting to make Bill Clinton look like a candidate for Mount Rushmore.
The chickens are going to come home to roost come 2014 when people start looking at why this law is so unpopular. Then maybe Fowler can work for Chairman Hatch.
She wrote it. Max Baucus rammed it through as written. Obama has his name on it.
Hope – a – Dope…
I am shocked and dismayed at the appearance of impropriety and conflict of interest in our Government and business community.
I am, however, certain that law and order will prevail. The integrity at the core of our elected officials will ensure that justice is done.
She is like political equivalent of those taking both ended dildos in porn movies.
Is Liz Fowler a policy maker, an opportunist or both? (Certainly an opportunist).
Is she actually senior enough to make policy?
Couldn’t agree more.
I keep re-typing what I’m trying to say!
Hope-A-Dope is screamingly funny!
Internet meme fer shure!
So, without presumin’ anything about the prisoner, yer honor,
Alice, why won’t you reveal your last name?
You surely know if you ain’t a proper Injun, the law prevents you from havin’ only one letter in yer name.
Do you know that?
And “Alice” don’t sound like mucha Injun name tuh me.
Let’s not make it sound as though victims of revolving door syndrome are rare on the Democratic side. They aren’t. Don’t know if they ever were rare, but they abound in the DLCgam-style Democratic Party.
Let’s take for one, Mary Schapiro, friend of Bernie Madoff and Obama nominee who is just now stepping down as head of the SEC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Schapiro
And how about Daschle, whom Obama wanted for Secretary to Health and Human Services? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Daschle
I could go on.
I vaguely remember Obama promising bold new conflict-of-interest standards and revolving-door prohibitions for all of his hires. But that was before he actually got elected, kicked his progressive supporters to the curb, and staffed his economic team with Wall Streeters, DOJ with a white-shoe law firm partner, the FDA’s food safety division with a Monsanto executive, etc., etc., etc. Regarding health care, I keep coming back to this YouTube clip: Obama on single payer health insurance. The 14% of GDP he cites as going to health-care is now at 18%, and according to the CBO it will exceed 20% when Obamacare is fully implemented. When compared to the costs of our peer countries with genuinely universal coverage and better overall health outcomes (9-12% of GDP), that’s a skim of over $1 trillion a year coming out of the pockets of patients, premium-payers, and taxpayers and going into the pockets of the for-profit health sector. I’d say the Manchurian Blue Dog Candidate is serving his true constituency — Liz Fowler’s and Karen Ignagni’s employers — exceptionally well. Only a pseudo-conservative could go to China and only a pseudo-progressive could sell the Heritage Foundation plan.
For your convenience, the permalink for the Politico cite is Scoop: Fowler leaves W.H. for Johnson & Johnson.