Earlier this summer, I wrote an article, based upon research for my forthcoming book, outlining the ways a single-payer health care system will lead to greater fraud and corruption. That afternoon, I received the following message—sent not just once, but four separate times—in my firm’s e-mail inbox:
Just finished reading the fear mongering article that Chris wrote for RCP. I am looking forward to reading and refuting his book on ‘single payer’. Id love to know which insurance companies own his arse via monetary payments. It’s obvious by Chris’ lack of salient facts regarding single payer that he is owned by some corporation. Since RCP only makes it look like others can comment you were spared from me systematically destroying your BS with the real facts of health care. In closing, go [f-ck] yourself you corporate [b-tch].
Whether in vulgar e-mails, Twitter rants, or blog posts, single payer supporters often start out by assuming that anyone opposed to socialized medicine must by definition have received some sort of payoff from drug companies or insurance companies. Even in my case, however, that claim has very little validity. More importantly, calling anyone opposed to single payer a corporate shill patronizes and insults the American people—the same people whose support they need to enact the proposal in the first place.
Take Me as an Example
I say “even in my case” because of my background. While no one has yet raised it publicly in connection with my book, at some point someone may realize that early in my career I served as a registered lobbyist for both a large (Aetna) and a relatively small (Assurant Health) insurance company.
If folks want to play “Gotcha” games with this nugget, they can—and some will—but there’s much less to this history than meets the eye. For starters, I took the lobbying job when I was aged 24, a little over a year out of grad school, and for the princely salary of…$39,000 per year. I never made six figures as a registered lobbyist—not even close, actually—and earned less in three and a half years as a registered lobbyist than most actual lobbyists make in one.
To be honest, I did little actual lobbying. My inclusion on the list of registered lobbyists represented more of an abundance of caution by my firm than anything else. (Under the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act, individuals do not have to register as a lobbyist if fewer than 20 percent of their hours are spent in paid lobbying activities.)
I prepared memos ahead of lobbying meetings, and drafted letters following those meetings, but precious little beyond that. After three years, I left to go back to Capitol Hill in a more senior role, where I had wanted to work all along.
In the years since, I have opposed bailouts for health insurers and pharmaceutical companies alike, bailouts that Democrats often supported. I skewered the Obama administration for their “rock-solid deal” (crafted behind closed doors, remember) with Big Pharma.
More to the point: I haven’t taken a dime of support from corporate interests to shill for their positions—and I won’t, period. My views and reputation are not for sale. They’re not even for rent.
Don’t Insult the American People
Even Ezra Klein, of all people, acknowledged Americans’ deep resistance to change regarding health care. In a July article analyzing whether individuals can keep their health insurance—an issue that has tripped up Kamala Harris, among others, during the Democratic presidential campaign—Klein asked some pertinent questions:
If the private insurance market is such a nightmare, why is the public so loath to abandon it? Why have past reformers so often been punished for trying to take away what people have and replace it with something better?…
Risk aversion [in health policy] is real, and it’s dangerous. Health reformers don’t tiptoe around it because they wouldn’t prefer to imagine bigger, more ambitious plans. They tiptoe around it because they have seen its power to destroy even modest plans. There may be a better strategy than that. I hope there is. But it starts with taking the public’s fear of dramatic change seriously, not trying to deny its power.
Yet, judging from the amount of times Bernie Sanders attacks “millionaires and billionaires” in his campaign speeches, he and others find it much easier to ignore the substance of Americans’ concerns, and instead blame corporations and “the rich” for deluding the public.
Liberals fall into this lazy trope—blaming the American people for the unpopularity of their policies—on a regular basis. In 2012, Barack Obama said that “the biggest mistake of my first term…was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” and that he didn’t “tell a story to the American people” about his supposed achievements.
Even Slate admitted that “to the President’s critics, it sounds patronizing. I was doing the right thing, but the slow American people didn’t get it” (emphasis original). Single-payer supporters fall into this trap on health care: “We could enact our socialist paradise easily, if only the health insurers and drug companies hadn’t bought off so many people.”
Starting off by questioning motives—by assuming everyone with any objections to single payer automatically must be a shill of corporate interests, just trying to bilk the sick and dying out of more money to pad their wallets—doesn’t seem like the best way to win friends and influence people, let alone pass a massive bill like single payer. And it speaks volumes about the radical left that they seem more intent on the former than the latter.
