From Politico comes a report that some of the Senate Finance Committee aides that are helping piece together health care legislation have connections to the health care industry. This leads to the reasonable suspicion that the health care industry may well be writing the bill itself:
Some of the most influential aides in the closed-door Senate Finance Committee negotiations over health care reform have ties to interests that would be directly affected by the legislation.
Before she was hired last year as senior counsel to Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Liz Fowler worked as a highly paid public policy adviser for WellPoint Inc., the nation’s largest publicly traded health benefits company.
Mark Hayes, health policy director and chief health counsel for Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is married to a registered lobbyist for a firm that represents drug companies and hospital groups, although the couple says she doesn’t lobby Grassley’s office.
Frederick Isasi, a health policy adviser to Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), was a registered lobbyist at Powell Goldstein, where his clients included public hospitals and the American Stroke Association.
Kate Spaziani, senior health policy aide to Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), was also a registered lobbyist at Powell Goldstein, although Conrad’s office says she worked as a lawyer — not as a lobbyist — for public hospitals on Medicare issues.
There’s no evidence that the aides’ ties have shaped the bill that Baucus hopes to release Tuesday, and the ultimate decisions over its provisions rest with the senators themselves. But critics say the involvement of such well-connected insiders could lead to dangerous conflicts.
