By:

Dave Kingsley

The Industry-Government Revolving Door

I remember a trip to the White House in 2012 with a group sponsored by the Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare. The purpose of the trip was to lobby against proposed cuts in SS and MC – two highly successful and popular government programs (funded mostly by the beneficiaries of the programs). President Obama had earlier almost caved into Republican demands for devastating cuts in both programs. Subsequently, the President appointed a commission (The Simpson-Bowls Commission) loaded with budget cutters and deficit hawks intent on recommending deep cuts to the programs.

We were in a room with all of the top Obama White House staff, which included Liz Fowler. At the time, I had not heard of Ms. Fowler. It didn’t take long for me to learn that she was President Obama’s point person on the Affordable Care Act. The route to that job, I soon learned, was from a John Hopkins PhD in Health Care Policy & Management, through the major health insurance company WellPoint, and then to the Senate Finance Committee under Chairman Max Baucus – a staging point for moving from government service to a high paid job lobbying – a revolving door between the Senate and K-Street.

It is my belief that Senator Baucus “put” Liz Fowler in the White House to insure that President Obama did the right thing vis a vis industry in the design of a health care program that would funnel enormous amounts of business to private insurers and pharmaceutical corporations. Indeed, she left the White House soon after passage of the law for a job with Johnson & Johnson – a major corporate beneficiary of Obamacare.

Liz Fowler’s Move Back to Government

Liz Fowler’s bio (posted by CMS) conveniently excised her first career at WellPoint (https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/leadership/center-medicare-medicaid-innovation). Furthermore, it says nothing about her years with J&J after leaving the Obama White House. It is interesting to note that the bio says, “She also played a key role drafting the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA).” My question is, “Was she working for WellPoint at the time?” The MMA propelled the Republican mission of privatizing Medicare forward at a breathtaking pace. It also included a new prescription drug plan (Part D) in which government negotiation of drug prices with major pharmaceutical companies was disallowed.

Ms. Fowler’s new job at CMS is not insignificant. Indeed, as Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMS Innovation Center), she will have a say over the kinds of innovation in care we need to see in delivery of medical services in nursing homes, hospitals, and clinics. Financial innovation in the nursing home industry has been vast in the past 40 years while innovation in care for patients has been practically nil.

Advocates Need to Seek Liz Fowler’s Removal from CMS

Taxpayers deserve to be represented by government officials who best represent their interests. Innovation in government funded healthcare will require a considerable amount of financial innovation that is fair to patients and taxpayers, availability of data, and transparency. Let’s take the big one: negotiation of drug prices. The excessive costs of pharmaceuticals reflects a toxic, perverse, symbiotic relationship between government and industry. That is not capitalism – it is statism – a necessarily corrupt and debauched form of economics.

Nursing home innovation will require major changes in operations that will humanize treatment and raise standards of medical ethics – which are sorely lacking at this time. Those innovations will reduce the amount of excess capital flowing from treatment facilities to investors.

Much needed innovations include data collection processes that provide valid and reliable data for evaluating the effectiveness of industry’s utilization of tax dollars versus excessive investor extraction of taxpayer provided capital. Also, data will be of no use to advocates, scholars, and the public in general if it is not readily accessible. That is not the case now, which is inexcusable in a super-wealthy country with unlimited resources for providing something as simple as a sophisticated, easily accessed, data system.

Unless Ms. Fowler has had an epiphany and a conversion experience, she does not, as a top official, belong in an agency taxpayers and program beneficiaries depend on for regulation, patient protection, and systems for monitoring provider activity. The tactic of corporate shills in government is the “tweak,” which typically changes little and reinforces corrupt, inhumane, and costly programs. The U.S. healthcare system is a disgrace and an embarrassment because of a corrupt relationship between industry and government the likes of which have never seen in U.S. history. It is time to stop thinking that the system can be transformed or even improved while the revolving door continues to revolve.

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