When Joe Lieberman announced his threat to filibuster against any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, it was natural to suspect the influence of his wife, Hadassah, and the insurance-pharmaceutical-lobbying complex that employed her for decades. But perhaps the problem is that the Connecticut senator isn't listening to her -- or the organization she now represents -- as attentively as he should.
Hadassah Lieberman has long billed herself as an advocate for women's health, even when her corporate career scarcely justified that description. But in her current position as a "global ambassador" at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world's biggest breast cancer charity, the senator's wife is indeed serving a worthy cause.
According to a Komen official, her role as a global ambassador includes "speaking engagements, networking in the public and private sectors, and direct engagement in the areas where we work," as well as supporting the efforts of the organization's "Global Promise Fund," which raises money to support Komen's efforts around the world. (Last summer she co-hosted a fundraising lunch at the Republican National Convention that raised eyebrows.) The same spokesperson indicated that Hadassah Lieberman is "not an employee" of Komen, meaning that she isn't paid, although her husband's 2008 Senate financial disclosure shows that she received "more than $1000" from the charity.
But whatever Hadassah actually does for Komen, the question that women might ask is whether she brings its important messages home to Joe. Has she explained, for instance, that thousands of uninsured and underinsured women die every year because so many don't get timely preventive care or treatment for their cancers? Has she pointed out that healthcare reform is of special importance to women, cancer patients and cancer survivors? Did she tell him why her organization is demanding the same health insurance reforms -- such as guaranteed provision of coverage and elimination of preexisting condition limitations -- that his Republican allies are determined to prevent?
The easiest way for Hadassah to educate Joe on these matters would be to direct him to the Web site of the Komen Advocacy Alliance, which outlines the benefits of healthcare reform for breast cancer patients and survivors. Without taking a position on the public option, Komen decries the fact that 46 million Americans have no insurance and clearly endorses guaranteed and affordable health coverage for all. During the congressional recess last August, the organization urged its supporters to lobby hard for universal coverage and strong regulation of the insurance industry.
Healthcare reform, argue the Komen advocates, must require the insurance companies to "offer health insurance to everyone even if they are waging an expensive battle with cancer," and to make sure that they "cannot charge higher premiums because of a person's preexisting condition or current health status," or drop coverage "if someone becomes seriously ill and must renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays his or her premium in full." Aside from stopping the public option, these reforms are precisely what the Republicans hope their friend from Connecticut will help them to kill.
When Lieberman appeared on "Face the Nation" last Sunday, he reiterated his position that stopping reform altogether would be better than passing a bill with the public option. "Nothing is better than getting that," he said. "We ought to follow the doctors' oath and say, 'First, let's do no harm.' "
But doing nothing is doing grave harm, as the ladies at Komen would sharply remind him. "Early detection is the key to survival," notes their healthcare reform site. "When breast cancer is detected early, the five-year survival rate is 98 percent" -- but "those who are uninsured or underinsured are more likely to skip potentially life-saving cancer screenings." The National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, which serves such women, lacks enough funding to screen 80 percent of them -- and even for women with insurance, co-payments can discourage screenings that would save lives. That is why the Komen position paper insists that insurers "must cover services like mammography and Pap smears with little or no cost-sharing for patients," in contrast to the Republican position that would allow the insurance companies to eliminate such mandates.
Like any supportive husband, Joe Lieberman shows up at Komen events, such as the organization's Race for the Cure in Manhattan last September. No doubt he thinks that breast cancer is bad and that his wife's work against it is good. But his current pandering to the insurance and drug lobbies -- which used to pay her -- cuts directly against the work she is doing today.
Ironically enough, Hadassah Lieberman was out of the country, on a working trip with Komen founder Nancy Brinker, when her husband started barking about a filibuster. (Even more ironically, she was traveling in Israel, a nation that has enjoyed a European-style universal healthcare system for many years, partially subsidized by American taxpayers and supported by politicians of all parties.)
Now that she's back in town, perhaps Hadassah will do something that could help women far more than any photo op or speech (and far more than anything she did when she worked for Hill & Knowlton, Apco Associates or Pfizer). She needs to tell her husband that if he cares about women's health, he will get out of the way of healthcare reform.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., isn't worried about Democrats getting angry if he votes with Republicans to filibuster healthcare reform legislation. But the reason for his lack of concern that he gave Politico this week may make some liberals even madder:
After what I went through in 2006, there’s nothing much more that anybody [who] disagrees with me can try to do.
Ouch.
First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a nonstarter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)
So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers. Who could be against freedom of choice? Fully 70 percent of Americans polled supported the idea. Open to all Americans, such a plan would have the scale and authority to negotiate low prices with drug companies and other providers, and force private insurers to provide better service at lower costs. But private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it would end up too much like what they have up in Canada.
So the compromise was to give the public option only to Americans who wouldn't be covered either by their employers or by Medicaid. And give them coverage pegged to Medicare rates. But private insurers and ... you know the rest.
So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.
But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans and "centrists" in the Senate. So Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than 4 million Americans.
It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."
And yet Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson mumble darkly that they may not even vote to allow debate on the floor of the Senate about the bill if it contains this paltry public option. And Republicans predict a "holy war."
But what more can possibly be compromised? Take away the word "public"? Make it available to only 12 people?
Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit healthcare system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.
Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no preexisting conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.
I'm still not giving up. I want every senator who's not in the pocket of the private insurers or Big Pharma to introduce and vote for a "Ted Kennedy Medicare for All" amendment to whatever bill Reid takes to the floor. And if this fails, a "Ted Kennedy Real Public Option for All" amendment. Let every Senate Democrat who doesn't have the guts to vote for either of them be known and counted.
Progressives hoping the Senate will be able to pass a public option had reason to hope on Tuesday morning. The source of that hope was the Hill's Alexander Bolton, who reported:
Sen. Joe Lieberman has reached a private understanding with Majority Leader Harry Reid that he will not block a final vote on healthcare reform, according to two sources briefed on the matter .... Reid’s staff is telling liberal interest groups that Lieberman (Conn.) has assured Reid he will vote with Democrats in the necessary procedural vote to end debate, perhaps with intentions to change the bill.
Problem is, for now, both sides are denying the story.
"If you believe this story is true, you will also believe that I am replacing A-Rod in Game Six of the Series," Lieberman spokesman Marshall Wittmann said in a statement. "The suggestion reported in The Hill that Senator Lieberman has made a 'private understanding' on his votes on health care reform is absolutely not true. Senator Lieberman's clear position is that he will vote for the motion to proceed to the health care bill because he supports health care reform that will control costs and insure people who don't have it now, but will oppose cloture on a final bill if it contains a public option."
In short, what that means is what Lieberman had already said -- he will be voting with the Democrats on one procedural motion, which will bring the bill to the floor. That alone will help Reid, as it's still no sure thing that he has the votes for that. But when it comes to defeating a filibuster, Lieberman is still saying he'll vote with the Republicans if the legislation contains a public option.
Reid's office, too, has come out trying to knock down Bolton's story. "There is no such understanding. We hope to have [Lieberman's] vote in the end but we are not there yet," Reid spokesman Jim Manley told TPMDC.
If you thought Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., couldn't tick off any more liberals than he did earlier this week, well, you thought wrong. It was enough for Lieberman, who managed to keep a committee chairmanship this year despite having campaigned for John McCain last year, to say he would join a Republican filibuster of a healthcare reform bill containing a public option. Now he says he could be campaigning for more candidates from the GOP next year.
"I probably will support some Republican candidates for Congress or Senate in the election in 2010. I'm going to call them as I see them," Lieberman told ABC News. "There's a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans,. There's a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side. And in between is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them -- and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who's not a Democrat."
If Democrats are disappointed by Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, they shouldn't be. Despite all of his past promises to support universal healthcare, nothing was more predictable than the Connecticut senator's fealty to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists.
Much the same can be said of Sen. Evan Bayh, who emerged from hiding on healthcare to announce that he too plans to filibuster against reform with the Republicans, regardless of what his constituents and Americans in general plainly want. Like Lieberman, his state is home to powerful corporations that want reform killed -- and like Lieberman, his wife has brought home very big paychecks from those same interests. . (UPDATE: A report published in a South Bend paper Thursday night says Bayh may now support a floor debate.)
The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.
At the time she joined the public relations and lobbying conglomerate in the spring of 2005, she expressed the touching hope that she would somehow be able to help those in need. "I have had a lifelong commitment to helping people gain better healthcare," she said in a press release. "I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented team at Hill & Knowlton to counsel a terrific stable of clients toward that same goal." Less than a year later, having pocketed $77,000 in salary, she quit without explanation -- just as her husband was facing a tough primary that he would eventually lose. Throughout the campaign, Hadassah Lieberman, her husband and their spokespersons explicitly refused to discuss her professional activities, except to note that she had not been required to register as a lobbyist.
But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them -- starting with nearly a decade in the "public affairs department" at Hoffman-LaRoche from 1972-81, followed by stints at Pfizer, where she spent four years as "director of policy, planning and communications," and APCO Associates, a major lobbying firm where she served as a "senior associate" in its large healthcare division before retiring in 1998.
She went back to work when she joined H&K, an outfit that became notorious for its billion-dollar defense of the tobacco industry. Not long after her contract began, Sen. Lieberman introduced legislation vastly extending patent protection for pharmaceutical companies -- notably including GlaxoSmithKline, a top client of his wife's firm.
The best that can be said about the Lieberman family's conflict of interest is that it appears to have ended in 2005 -- while the Bayh family continues to collect enormous amounts of money from the same health insurance and drug companies that will benefit from her husband’s actions. Indeed, the smell of ethical rot arising from the Bayh household is even worse than the self-serving aroma that surrounds the Liebermans.
Susan Bayh was invited to join the board of Wellpoint back in 1998, when the Indiana-based company was still called Anthem Insurance and had not yet completed the mergers that made it the largest health insurer in America (and gave it monopoly status in many regions of the country). According to her official biography on Wellpoint's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, her qualifications to sit on the board of a billion-dollar corporation were minimal, to put it politely. She was 38 years old, teaching law at a local university, with limited experience as a corporate attorney at Eli Lilly & Co., the big pharmaceutical company that is also headquartered in Indiana. But then her husband, Evan, after two terms as governor, had just been elected to the United States Senate.
Susan Bayh's compensation from Wellpoint, including the stock options that she has exercised repeatedly over the past 10 years, has reached an estimated $2 million, including last year's director salary of over $300,000. She is the only director who, according to the most recent SEC filing, actually owns no shares in the company, because she sells as soon as her options become available. In January 2007, she exercised her options to acquire 3,333 shares of Wellpoint for an estimated cost of $147,000 -- and sold them the same day for an estimated price of $260,000, netting a tidy sum of $113,000. She repeated the same process five months later for a net profit of $136,000, and then seven months after that, selling another 1,430 shares for $123,000. That represented profits of nearly $400,000 on top of her salary.
Evidently Susan Bayh is most interested in accumulating wealth, and so far she has done a fine job. The Bayhs are now worth somewhere between $5 million and $10 million, an amount that was not scrimped from Evan's salary in the Senate. In 2007 he reassured a Fort Wayne newspaper in sonorous tones that sounded Liebermanesque: "I can honestly tell you that if my wife did not have a job, none, I can't think of a single decision I've made that would be any different. I look at what's best for our state and our country and my own conscience. My integrity matters more to me than anything, so I always do what's right for the people who put their trust in me."
Compared with Bayh's lucre from Wellpoint and the other corporations whose boards she graces, the earnings of Hadassah Lieberman appear paltry. Yet even though she has retired, for now, from counseling the pharma and insurance industries, the devotion to public health she has long proclaimed is still tinged with hypocrisy. Upon leaving Hill & Knowlton, Hadassah joined Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s largest breast cancer charity, as a paid "ambassador." Again, it isn't clear what she does besides posing for photo ops in places from Brazil to Israel, but as a Komen advocate she is supposed to be trying to prevent women from losing their lives.
So perhaps someone should point out to her what will happen if her husband kills healthcare reform this year. Millions of uninsured and underinsured women will continue to delay or simply fail to get preventive medical care, including mammography, because they cannot afford those procedures. Thousands of them will die as a direct result of that foregone care, just as thousands die each year from lack of insurance. The swiftest way to save those women from breast cancer is health insurance reform -- and the filibuster will be their death sentence.
Me & Joe say NO to a "Public Option"