From the invaluable Tim Carney:
The Obama team regularly dismisses opponents as industry lackeys. The Democratic National Committee blasted out e-mails this week warning that “for every member of Congress, there are eight anti-reform lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill” and “Congress is under attack from insurance lobbyists.”
But drug industry lobbyists, according to Politico, spent the weekend “huddled with Democratic staffers” who needed the drug lobby to “sign off” on proposals before moving ahead. Meanwhile, we learn that the drug lobby is buying millions of dollars of ads in 43 districts where a Democratic candidate stands to suffer for supporting the bill. The doctors’ lobby and the hospitals’ lobby are also on board with the Senate bill.
So the battle at this point is not reformers versus industry, as Obama would have you believe. Rather, it is a battle between most of the health care industry and the insurance companies.
(And the insurers are not opposed to the whole package. On the bill’s central planks — limits on price discrimination, outlawing exclusions for pre-existing conditions, a mandate that employers insure their workers and a mandate that everyone hold insurance — insurers are on board. They object mostly that the penalty is too small for violating the individual mandate.)