Image of the Day

Photograph: screen grab, Bill Moyers' Journal
Former WellPoint VP Elizabeth Fowler sits behind her boss, Sen. Max
Baucus, as he announces in 2009 that the health care bill will have no
public option.
When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first
drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate
Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in
drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the
architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy
counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually
drafted it. As Politico put it at the time: "If you drew an organizational
chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler
would be the chief operating officer."
What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining
Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the
Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal
lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider
(before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Fowler had worked as Baucus'
top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the
person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus' office,
Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin,
Downs, and Young.
Whatever one's views on Obamacare were and are: the bill's mandate
that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance
industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that
industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the
author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as
well." Watch the five-minute Bill Moyers report from 2009, embedded
below, on the key role played in all of this by Liz Fowler and the
"revolving door" between the health insurance/lobbying industry and
government officials at the time this bill was written and passed.
More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone
to oversee implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . .
Liz Fowler. That the White House would put a former health insurance