Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [83]
Obama continued the criticism during his campaign. On the Obama-Biden website, the campaign stated: “Barack Obama and Joe Biden will repeal the ban on direct negotiation with drug companies and use the resulting savings, which could be as high as $30 billion, to further invest in improving health care coverage and quality.”
And the example was the subject of the campaign ad named “Billy”:
Narrator: “The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee, who pushed the law through, went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year.”
The screen fades to black to inform the viewer that “Barack Obama is the only candidate who refuses Washington lobbyist money,” while the candidate continues his lecture:
“Imagine that. That’s an example of the same old game playing in Washington. You know, I don’t want to learn how to play the game better, I want to put an end to the game playing.”24
So just as clearly as the public was led to think that Obama’s reform would include a public option, the public was also led to think that Obama’s reform would never include another “tremendous boon for the drug companies” in the form of a(nother) free pass from the forces of the market.
On both fronts, of course, we were wrong.
As the story is told by Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic, Obama took on health care almost as “a test”: “Could the country still solve its most vexing problems? If he abandoned comprehensive reform, he would be conceding that the United States was, on some level, ungovernable.”25
But the question was on what terms America would be governed. As Cohn writes: “Obama had promised to change the way Washington does business. No more negotiating in the anterooms of Capitol Hill. No more crafting bills to please corporate interests. But Obama also wanted to pass monumental legislation. And it wasn’t long before the tension between the two began to emerge.”26
This statement is almost right, but not quite. Certainly Obama had promised to end the practice of “crafting bills to please corporate interests.” (“[U]nless we’re willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change.”)27 But that’s different from promising to give up politics. (“No more negotiating in the anterooms of Capitol Hill.”) There’s nothing wrong with negotiating, and with compromise, so long as the driving force in that compromise is the single dependency that this democracy is to reveal: the people. Maybe voters in Nebraska need something from California before they can support health care. There’s no sin in making that deal.
The sin, as Obama described it, and as I certainly believe it, is when forces not reflecting the people force compromise into the system. It is the “undue influence of lobbyists”28—undue because not tied to the proper metric for power within a democracy.
Yet the story that Cohn tells is the story of such “undue influence” again and again. The administration strikes a deal to get PhRMA’s support for the bill. The price? A promise to protect PhRMA in just the way President Bush did with the Prescription Drug Act: no bargaining to lower prices. That administration estimated that a health care bill would increase the revenue to the drug companies by $100 billion. This deal struck by Obama with the lobbyists from PhRMA assured PhRMA that it would keep much of that increase.
The same with the “public option.” The Congressional Budget Office had estimated