Obamacare architect leaves White House for pharmaceutical industry job
Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing Washington as purely
as Elizabeth Fowler
* * Glenn Greenwald
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 December 2012 05.51 EST
Former WellPoint VP
Elizabeth Fowler sits behind her boss, Sen. Max Baucus, as he announces
in 2009 that the health care bill will have no public option.
Photograph: screen grab, Bill Moyers' Journal
Former WellPoint VP
Elizabeth Fowler sits behind her boss, Sen. Max Baucus, as he announces
in 2009 that the health care bill will have no public option.
Photograph: screen grab, Bill Moyers' Journal
When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first drafted, the
key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max
Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As
Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was
Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler
discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. As Politico put it at the
time: "If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate
health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer."
What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus'
office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice
President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at
WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider (before
going to WellPoint, as well as after, Fowler had worked as Baucus' top
health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the
person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus' office,
Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs,
and Young.
Whatever one's views on Obamacare were and are: the bill's mandate that
everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry,
unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that
industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler
is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its
author as well." Watch the five-minute Bill Moyers report from 2009,
embedded below, on the key role played in all of this by Liz Fowler and
the "revolving door" between the health insurance/lobbying industry and
government officials at the time this bill was written and passed.
More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone to oversee
implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . . Liz Fowler.
That the White House would put a former health insurance industry
executive in charge of implementation of its new massive health care law was
roundly condemned by good government groups as at least a violation of the
"spirit" of governing ethics rules and
even "gross", but those objections were, of course, brushed aside by the White
House. She then became Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and
Economic Policy at the National Economic Council.
Now, as Politico's "Influence" column briefly noted on Tuesday, Fowler is once
again passing through the deeply corrupting revolving door as she leaves the
Obama administration to return to the loving and lucrative arms of the private
health care industry:
>"Elizabeth
Fowler is leaving the White House for a senior-level position leading
'global health policy' at Johnson & Johnson's government affairs and
policy group."
The pharmaceutical giant that just hired Fowler actively supported the passage
of Obamacare through its membership in the Pharmaceutical Researchers and
Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobby. Indeed, PhRMA was one of the most
aggressive supporters - and most lavish beneficiaries - of the health care bill
drafted by Fowler. Mother Jones' James Ridgeway proclaimed "Big Pharma" the
"big winner" in the health care bill. And now, Fowler
will receive ample rewards from that same industry as she peddles her
influence in government and exploits her experience with its inner
workings to work on that industry's behalf, all of which has been made
perfectly legal by the same insular, Versailles-like Washington culture
that so lavishly benefits from all of this.
It's difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, anti-democratic,
corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as shamelessly and purely as
Liz Fowler.
One of the few competitors I can think of is Adm. Michael McConnell, who
parlayed his military and intelligence career into a lucrative gig
at Booz Allen, one of the nation's largest private intelligence
contractors; then became George W Bush's Director of National
Intelligence (where he spearheaded a huge gift to the telecom industry -
retroactive immunity shielding it from all accountability for its
participation in the illegal Bush NSA eavesdropping program - as well as
continued his Booz Allen work of privatizing intelligence and
surveillance functions); then returned to the loving arms of Booz Allen, where
he now exploits his national security credentials on behalf of
industry interests (by, for instance, spearheading the fear-mongering
campaign about cyber-warfare in order to advocate for security programs
that would amply enrich Booz Allen's clients).
This is precisely
the behavior which, quite rationally, makes the citizenry so jaded about
Washington. It's what ensures that the interests of the same permanent
power factions are served regardless of election outcomes. It's what
makes a complete mockery out of claims of democracy. And it's what
demonstrates that corporatism and oligarchy are the dominant forms of
government in the US:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/obamacare-fowler-lobbyist-industry1
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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