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* Ron Williams - Aetna - Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
* H. Edward Hanway - CIGNA - Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
* Angela Braly - WellPoint - Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
* Dale Wolf - Coventry Health Care - Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
* Michael Neidorff - Centene - Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
* James Carlson - AMERIGROUP - Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
* Michael McCallister - Humana - Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
* Jay Gellert - Health Net - Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
* Richard Barasch - Universal American - Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
* Stephen Hemsley - UnitedHealth Group - Total Compensation: $3,241,042.
Who wrote the ACA Bill?
In May 2010, after final passage of the current health care law, Senator Max Baucus, from whose Finance Committee the legislation emerged, stood before the Senate and members of the press to publicly thank the person he credited with making it all happen:
“I wish to single out one person, and that one person is sitting next to me. Her name is Liz Fowler. Liz Fowler is my chief health counsel. Liz Fowler has put my health care team together. Liz Fowler worked for me many years ago, left for the private sector, and then came back when she realized she could be there at the creation of health care reform because she wanted that to be, in a certain sense, her professional lifetime goal. She put together the White Paper last November–2008–the 87-page document which became the basis, the foundation, the blueprint from which almost all health care measures in all bills on both sides of the aisle came.”
So who is Liz Fowler? Prior to joining Baucus’ staff as the senior advisor on health care, she was Vice President of Public Policy and External Affairs for none other than the aforementioned number two insurance company, Wellpoint. Not to put too fine a point to it, but it would be equivalent to the chief lobbyist for AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans), a national trade organization of over 1,300 insurers, infiltrating the Senate Finance Committee and writing a law to benefit not the American people, but the entire insurance industry. As it turns out, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is not intended to make health insurance more affordable for the American people. It is designed to make the American people more affordable for the health insurance industry.
As it further turns out, Baucus’ staff was infested with Wellpoint hirelings. Prior to Fowler arriving on scene, the chief advisor on Senator Baucus’ team was Michelle Easton. Upon passing the baton to Ms. Fowler, Easton went to work as a lobbyist for Wellpoint at Tarplin, Downs and Young, a DC-based lobbying firm founded in 2006 “specializing in strategic consulting and policy development with a particular focus on health care”.
Keep turning the wheel, though, and we come to Stephen Northrup. Northrup was the chief health advisor to Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi when Enzi pushed similar health care legislation in 2006. Prior to joining Enzi’s staff, Northrup was the executive director of the Long Term Pharmacy Alliance, an organization that played a lead role on drafting the mother of all giveaways to Big Pharma, Medicare Part D. Not surprisingly, the revolving door and interchangeable roles of advisors/staff/lobbyists eventually lead Northrup in 2007 to Wellpoint, where he served as Vice President of Federal Affairs.
The insurance lobby, tired of decades of failed attempts to influence Congress to create a national health care plan which would immunize them from the looming trillions of dollars in liabilities they faced as the boomer generation aged, simply decided they would infiltrate Congress instead and write the legislation themselves. Time, after all, was running out.
But simply enacting the legislation was not enough. Big Insurance also demanded a seat at the table when it came time to actually drafting the regulations and implementing the law, since incompetent government bureaucrats could not be trusted to enact regulations and procedures that would fully indemnify the insurance lobby to its complete satisfaction. Which brings us to the return of Liz Fowler, the author of the Affordable Care Act who is now the Deputy Director of Consumer Information and Oversight at the U.S. Department of Human Services, sort of an industry cop on watch to be sure government employees do what they are told.
Despite Big Insurance’s success in pulling off one of the most intricate swindles in the history of mankind by transferring tens of trillions of dollars of liabilities from their balance sheets to that of the Treasury Department, all to be paid for by massive tax increases on the American people (or fees, if you’re still arguing about the Commerce Clause in the increasingly irrelevant Constitution), the whole transaction would certainly deserve a special place in the pantheon of lawlessness were it not for the decidedly unhappy outcome it will have for the true victims of this crime - the American citizens, who are now merely the property of an insurance industry that has a vested interest in keeping them healthy while they are still useful. Those 22 year-olds who are today gleeful that they can stay on Mommy and Daddy’s insurance for a few more years won’t be quite as cheerful in 2030 when they are called before a panel Liz Fowler will undoubtedly have a role in creating to explain why their cholesterol level has increased or are informed that certain substances detected in their last blood test indicated they are surpassing the monthly limit on pepperoni pizzas. After being sent home with a hefty fine and orders to adhere to a strict diet of carrot sticks and mineral water, along with the latest behavioral modification drug developed by the recent merger of Pfizer and Merck, they may well wish they had been paying attention back in 2012, when there was still a chance to put a stop to it all.
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