At a meeting last April with corporate lobbyists, aides to President Barack Obama and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) helped set in motion a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, primarily financed by industry groups, that has played a key role in bolstering public support for health care reform.
The role Baucus’s chief of staff, Jon Selib, and deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina played in launching the groups was part of a successful effort by Democrats to enlist traditional enemies of health care reform to their side. No quid pro quo was involved, they insist, as do the lobbyists themselves.
The result has been a somewhat unlikely alliance between an administration that came into power criticizing George W. Bush for his closeness to Big Business and groups such as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the American Medical Association.
The previously undisclosed meeting April 15 at the offices of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee led to the creation of two groups — Americans for Stable Quality Care and a now-defunct predecessor group called Healthy Economy Now — that have spent tens of millions of dollars on TV advertising supporting health reform efforts.
In the most recent ad sponsored by Americans for Stable Quality Care, Obama speaks directly into the camera for 60 seconds, extolling the virtues of health care reform, while text at the bottom of the screen encourages viewers to visit the websites of the White House and the Finance Committee, which this week approved a 10-year, $829 billion health overhaul.
Both coalitions operate independently of the administration and Senate Democrats, and spokesmen for both the White House and Baucus said that no pressure — implicit or otherwise — to join the pro-health-care reform groups was applied to industry representatives at the meeting.
After arriving late, Messina delivered a presentation to what was one of many such “outreach” meetings he has attended, and he left before the other participants began talking strategy. Selib, who had convened the gathering, “didn’t ask anyone for money,” said a Baucus aide.
Indeed, attendees describe a more subtle dynamic: The Democratic officials made no overt demands. Rather, they brought together the players and laid the groundwork for the creation of the coalition, and that was followed by more direct solicitations from an outside Democratic consultant, Nick Baldick, retained by Healthy Economy Now, asking attendees at the meeting to join the coalition and contribute to its ad campaigns.
One ethics expert, however, said the meeting still raises issues. No matter how careful Messina and Selib were to avoid conversation about Healthy Economy Now, their mere presence at what proved to be the coalition’s creation raises questions, said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that advocates for greater transparency and ethics in government.
“There’s no problem with sitting down at the table and talking,” said Allison. “But if they are signaling that they would really like these groups to support health care reform and trying to tell the groups how they’ll benefit from the plan, they’re laying a ‘quid’ on the table, and — even if they don’t discuss dollar amounts or advertising strategies — they’re suggesting what the ‘quo’ is, which is the groups’ support for the plan.”
The White House and committee officials said the meeting and the months of talks that followed it — between officials putting together the health care proposals and the stakeholders who would be affected by them — prove a willingness by the Obama administration and Baucus to engage groups traditionally considered adversaries of health care reform.
Ken Johnson, a senior vice president at PhRMA, called the April meeting “one of the key points where there was a coming together and a discussion of ideas and shared goals.”
Johnson said PhRMA, which ultimately provided the lion’s share of the $24 million to the two coalitions, “could have walked away at any time.”
Days after the meeting, Healthy Economy Now’s website address was registered, and meeting attendees began receiving unsolicited calls asking for cash for the coalition from Baldick, whose firm — Hilltop Public Solutions — had been hired to run Healthy Economy Now.
In addition to PhRMA and the American Medical Association, the strange-bedfellows coalition included AARP, the American Cancer Society, the Business Roundtable, the advocacy group Families USA and the Service Employees International Union, as well as trade groups for biotech and medical device firms.
Other attendees opted out. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and America’s Health Insurance Plans refused to participate in a group backing a plan that they would ultimately oppose — and the insurance group this week emerged as the most aggressive opponent to the bill Baucus shepherded through his committee.
Many participants in the meeting had a great deal at stake in health care legislation. At the time Healthy Economy Now launched the first of its ads May 12, PhRMA was negotiating with Baucus and the White House a complex deal in which drug makers would contribute $80 billion to lower costs in exchange for avoiding downward pressure on drug prices.
The Associated Press later revealed that PhRMA had agreed to spend a whopping $150 million pushing the health overhaul — a sum that included its contributions to Healthy Economy Now and Americans for Stable Quality Care.
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