Big Pharma and Insurance Companies Want Coakley
By Bronwyn's Harbor on January 13, 2010 at 11:16 AM in Current Affairs
Yes, the drama on TV news today is grainy video showing a Weekly Standard reporter being pushed to the ground by a Coakley staffer outside last night’s fundraiser. However the real drama is described in a editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal — Coakley’s Saviors – The health-care industry rides to the Democratic rescue. — that nails the major pharmaceutical and health insurance companies: I think these companies realize that this plan is going to fill their pockets, thanks to their gifts to key members of Congress, on the backs of the decreasing middle class in this nation. Why else would they have all be in attendance at the tony D.C. fundraiser for Martha Coakley, instead of donating to Republican Scott Brown? The WSJ seems to think that these companies are being short-sighted. Are they? How do you see their hands out to Coakley?
Amid a Beltway panic, the health lobby is riding to the rescue of the Massachusetts liberal, whose defeat in the special Senate race next Tuesday could deny Democrats the 60th vote for ObamaCare and thus maybe spare the U.S. health system from the coming damage.
As first reported by Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner, the host committee for the fundraiser at Pennsylvania Avenue’s Sonoma Restaurant includes lobbyists for Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, Novartis and sundry other drug companies that have been among the biggest of ObamaCare’s corporate sponsors. Other hosts—who have raised at least $10,000 for Ms. Coakley—include representatives from UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Humana and other insurers. As far as we can tell, the insurance industry claims to oppose ObamaCare’s current incarnation.
Naturally, lobbyists from America’s Health Insurance Plans and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the major trade groups, were on hand too. Money follows power in Washington, obviously, though this example seems especially inexplicable given that Ms. Coakley’s GOP opponent, state senator Scott Brown, may be the last chance to defuse the health-care doomsday machine. But maybe someone in the press corps will bother to mention this episode the next time President Obama takes aim at the “special interests” he claims are opposing his agenda.
Against overwhelming public opposition, the only things keeping ObamaCare alive at this point are power politics and the misguided corporate cease-fire that Democrats have either coerced or bought—or is homegrown at companies like Pfizer that are deeply invested in more government control of the economy. Ms. Coakley’s election would make that outcome a certainty.
Methinks the WSJ is confused. They believe that the corporate “ceasefire” has been “coerced or bought.” I suspect the corporations have been assured that they’ll come out ahead — somewhere in those 2,000-plus pages that nobody has had a chance to read.
by Ronald Scott
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