Douglas Turner: Health care lobbyists battling ‘public option’
WASHINGTON — Reps. Brian Higgins, Louise Slaughter and a battalion of other congressional Democrats are caught in a menacing squeeze between their president and the lobbyists who have dominated the capital for a generation.
They are in the early stages of the mother of all legislative battles, prompted by President Obama’s demand for sweeping health care reform.
On one side are 300 million Americans who have watched medical costs skyrocket — including 47 million who have no health insurance. On the other side is a powerful combine that has spent billions in campaign gifts and lobbying to make sure that things stay the way they are. The only real issue in this fight is Obama’s proposal for a government-run health care program that will compete with private insurance plans, called “the public option.”
It is the cutting edge. Obama says it will “keep the insurance industry honest.” The industry says a public option will break its businesses and lead to nationalized health care — like the rest of the industrialized world.
The American Medical Association, which fought universal health care when President Harry Truman proposed it, tried to sweeten its image leading up to this brutal fight. But last week, it strongly opposed Obama’s plan.
Higgins, D-Buffalo, and Slaughter, D-Fairport, have been slow to publicly embrace the public option, although Obama’s forces say his popularity and total party control of both houses offer the best chance in history to do something meaningful. Spokesmen for Higgins and Slaughter now say they support the president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Spokesmen for both insist they are not influenced in any way by money they took from the health care industry, including $4,100 Higgins got from Independent Health of Buffalo, and the thousands Slaughter has received from the AMA and insurance interests.
Higgins spokeswoman Theresa Kennedy said the $4,100 is an “infinitesimal percentage” of all the money Higgins has received since 2004. It is, sort of. Records compiled by Congressional Quarterly and Center for Responsive Politics show Higgins got thousands more from PACs fronting for hospitals, medical professionals and drug companies. Likewise for Slaughter.
But those gifts are “infinitesimal” compared to the cash they took from labor and others who want the public option. And their money is an errant fragment of the avalanche of dough the medical and insurance industries have dumped on the two men who control the committees who most influence the writing of the bills.
They are the much-investigated Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D-Manhattan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.
Some Democrats trapped in a vise between their generous industry friends and their president hope the public option will die in committee before they are put on the spot in a floor vote. After all, in 1994 then Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan managed to smother reforms proposed by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the behest of downstate hospitals.
Obama speaks today to the AMA. He has an uphill fight against the $204 million the AMA has spent lobbying in the last decade. Health professional organizations spent $82 million lobbying this year alone.
Members of Baucus’ and Rangel’s panels got $25 million in campaign gifts from the health care industry in the 2007-08 cycle. Looming as formidable as the cash are the nearly 370 people who now lobby Congress who were once members and staff of the committees writing the health care bills.
But there is a new force in play: the Internet. The progressive Web site Change Congress claims it forced Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., to back off his opposition to the public option by web-casting that Nelson took $2 million from insurance and health care interests, 83 percent from out of state.
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