Just In Case You Forgot, Obamacare Isn't Just Incompetent and Socialist, It's Also Corrupt and Corporatist

People who help people are the luckiest people in the world.

Tim P. Carney writes:

he contraception mandate is nakedly a huge subsidy to the industry that most firmly supported Obamacare: the drugmakers.

The drug industry has spent more on lobbying under Obama than any other industry. Top lobbyists at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in 2009 met behind closed doors with the White House and Senate Democrats, promising political support for Democrats in exchange for friendly provisions in Obamacare.

Top Obama bundler Sally Susman oversees the lobbying shop at drug giant Pfizer, which sells $7.6 million a year in name-brand birth control pills, while also selling contraceptive injections and generic drugs. Pfizer's CEO during the Obamacare debate was Obama donor Jeffrey Kindler. In a corporate filing, the company justified his salary increase by pointing to his Obamacare lobbying.

Obama's contraception mandate requires all employer-sponsored health care plans to cover 100 percent of the cost of all FDA-approved contraception. That gives customers incentives to choose Pfizer's name-brand pills, because the entire cost is passed onto employers and thus onto customers and colleagues. And of course, this means more profit for Pfizer.

Merck, which also makes birth control pills, deployed top lobbyist, former Democratic congressional staffer and major Democratic donor Mark Raabe to Capitol Hill and the White House to lobby on “efforts to gain coverage of preventive services,” according to company lobbying filings. The administration uses the “preventive services” provision of Obamacare to justify the contraception mandate. Merck sells implants and other contraceptives -- if “sells” is the right word for products that many customers now get for “free,” sticking colleagues and taxpayers with the bill.

...

This is just a brief taste of the corporatism that went into creating the mandate. The corporatism underlying the law's defenses is more telling in some ways.

He contrasts the Left's eagerness to pay off corporations who are willing to play ball with their seething hostility towards the rights of the owners of Hobby Lobby -- owners consisting of a husband, wife, and three children.

posted by Ace at 07:21 PM

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