Showing posts with label Senator Max Baucus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Senator Max Baucus. Show all posts

Friday, December 7, 2012

After Writing ObamaCare Legislation, Elizabeth Fowler Goes To Work For Largest Pharmaceutical Company In The World

Elizabeth Fowler
Big corporations have given Capitalism a bad name.  While the idea of looking for new ways to generate profit, and cut expenses, is noble to most small business owners, big business has been taking this goal of bigger profits to a different, immoral, and often illegal, level.  Governments are often used by big business to help pass rules and regulations that are favorable to one group, and harmful to others.  Instead of an actual free-market capitalist system, where everyone is on equal ground competing with each other, we have a system of pay-offs, lobbyists, and revolving doors, often referred to as crony-Capitalism.

The best modern-day case of crony-Capitalism is probably the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or as it is commonly referred to as, ObamaCare, a bill that penalizes people who choose not to buy insurance from a private provider.  This act essentially creates millions of new customers for the insurance companies.  On June 28, 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government does not have the Constitutional right to mandate that people must buy health insurance from a private company. However, it does have the right to tax those that don't, according to the Supreme Court. Therefore, it upheld the Act.

The poster child for this immoral merger of big business and government would have to be the "architect" of ObamaCare, Elizabeth Fowler.  In 2001, Fowler was working as chief health policy counsel under Montana Sentator Max Baucus, until 2006, when she departed for a two-year stint at health insurance company WellPoint, only to return to the Senate in 2008, again working on health policy for Senator Baucus, where she would end up being a main player in the Senate health care negotiations that would eventually bring us Obamacare.  Senator Baucus had even singled out Fowler as the person who layed the "foundation" and the "blueprint" of what eventually became ObamaCare.

(Sidenote: WellPoint, Inc. is the largest managed health care, for-profit company in the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, a federation of 38 separate health insurance organizations and companies in the United States. Combined, they directly or indirectly provide health insurance to over 99 million Americans.)