One cannot help but be struck by the monstrous incongruities between the hopes Obamacare engendered and the grubby realities of its passage, implementation, and results. The ACA was sold with messianic visions and utopianism. Nancy Pelosi promised Obamacare would free us from work – we could all quit our jobs and take up the violin. But these were just tactics, deliberate strategies to neuter opposition to the bill. In this series, the Truth Squad exposes the methods used to pass Obamacare (the lies, the deceit, the orgy of lobbying). We also hold Obamacare’s proponents accountable for the results (e.g., the botched roll-out). It was not the “stupidity of the American voter” that allowed Obamacare to pass. We had a huge game run on us by masters of deceit who should never be trusted with public policy again.
The page references are from the 2015 book America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill.
Part 1 – Special Interests
Part 2 – Deceit
Part 3 – Botched Rollout
Part 4 – Other Perversities
Special Interests
- Pharmaceutical companies were estimated to get $200 billion in revenue in the first 10 years of reform. Baucus asked for $130 billion back through reduced drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid, plus a new revenue tax. The game was ‘agree to this or we’ll stick it to you by, among other things, removing the prohibitions on Medicare negotiating prices with the drug companies and consumers buying drugs from Canada.’ “Nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging,” one lobbyist said. The deal was finalized at $70 billion from the industry group PhRMA in the form of — get this! –- secret contributions to political action committees to run ads in favor of senators who were for reform and against senators who were not. The PACs selected would not have to reveal their donors. Other interests, such as unions, put in token amounts so the PACs could be misrepresented as broad coalitions. The plan was to publicly deny any PhRMA connection. The political consulting firm involved was co-owned by David Axelrod before he became a senior Obama adviser in the White House. And this is how ‘the people’s business’ got done. During his campaign, Obama had promised to televise the healthcare negotiations on C-SPAN. (pp. 97-101)
- Obamacare is the product of D.C. insiders negotiating secret deals. (p. 94)
- Healthcare lobbyists visited Senate Finance Committee staff to get government-guaranteed customers and to protect their bottom lines from more radical reforms. The game at the time was to get the industry to finance reform so taxation would not be necessary. (The law eventually contained dozens of taxes, instead.) (p. 96)
- Tort reform was intentionally left out of the bill so as not to anger the trial lawyers’ lobby, “the most reliable source of big-money support for … Senate Democrats.” (p. 158)
- The hospital lobby fought to make readmission penalties extremely low, i.e., negligible as a percent of total revenue. (p. 416)
- The closed-door deals stripped away any hope of ‘bending the cost curve down’, but proponents continued to misrepresent the bill as if it would. (p. 416)