by Aaron Klein
This is a win-win for health insurers, and fertile ground for government/private sector cronyism. One of the major private-sector beneficiaries of ObamaCare would be the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), a group of 39 million members, and the nation’s largest provider of Medigap. AARP lobbied hard for ObamaCare and now stands to profit from it.7 A late-March 2011 report by the House Ways & Means Committee exposed AARP’s “apparent conflict of interest” and revealed the tradeoff for AARP’s support of the law—AARP stands to make $1 billion over ten years “on health insurance plans whose sales [were] expected to pick up under the new law.”8
A major grouping of socialists within the U.S. Congress—the seventy-five-member Congressional Progressive Caucus—still mostly favors a single-payer plan. The CPC, founded originally by the Democratic Socialists of America, attempted to relaunch single-payer in December 2011 with its Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act. The 99% Act would provide protections for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security;9 hence it is not purely a single-payer plan.
The CPC bill projects $88 billion in “savings” by allowing a “public option” to operate in conjunction with private health insurance in so-called health care exchanges. It also posits an additional $156 billion in savings by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. The progressive legislation would also reinstate higher federal Medical Assistance Percentage rates, which is the reimbursement formula for federal Medicaid grants to the states. This would purportedly “ease the state budget crises and help states finance health care for disadvantaged children, poor seniors, and the disabled.”10 The CAP called this provision of the 99% Act “the single most important step the federal government could take to provide relief to state and local governments,” perhaps boosting employment by 349,000 jobs in fiscal year 2012.11
Of course, the key word here is perhaps. As you will see, a gigantic coalition of left-wing progressive groups like CAP were not so certain of ObamaCare’s future and, in early 2011, launched an all-out campaign to save ObamaCare a year in advance of the bill’s scrutiny before the Supreme Court.
SINGLE-PAYER AS TAX PLAN
These chapters are being written immediately following the high court’s March 26–28, 2012, hearing of oral arguments on ObamaCare, and before the court hands down its ruling in June. Our analysis is, should the Supreme Court strike the law, or its individual mandate, then the huge messaging efforts now under way to prevent its repeal will immediately shift to pushing for a single-payer health care plan—which will be touted as a legitimate tax—to be implemented before the current Obama administration comes to an end.
Should ObamaCare be repealed or overturned, progressive journalist Ezra Klein prognosticated in his March 30, 2012, Washington Post column that neither Democrats nor Republicans would be likely to propose “any big changes” to the current health care system. Klein did suggest how the single-payer health insurance goal could be accomplished piecemeal.12 Rising health care costs for employers, he opined, would lead Senate Democrats to “begin dipping their toes in the water with a strategy based around incremental expansions” of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). As this plan inched forward through budget reconciliation in the Senate—where the policies could be passed with only 51 votes—it would lead to “more and more Americans being covered through public insurance” and eventually to “something close to a single-payer system” with a majority of Americans covered by the federal government.13
A great majority, perhaps—but not every American. When one recalls that ObamaCare was pitched to the American public as a moral imperative, in order to provide health coverage to 30–40 million Americans who were uninsured, the following should provoke outrage. According to a March 15, 2012, estimate by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, even if ObamaCare is upheld and fully implemented, there will still be 27 million Americans with no health insurance coverage.14
A not-so-surprising development occurred a mere two days after the Supreme Court arguments ended and it was apparent that ObamaCare was in deep trouble. On March 30, CAP and ObamaCare’s other progressive supporters were described by Judicial Watch as “apoplectic at how badly the oral arguments went for their side.” The groups’ first target was Don Verrilli, Obama’s solicitor general, whose embarrassing stumbling performance failed to defend the indefensible before the Court.15
Amy Gardner of the leftist-friendly Washington Post cautiously characterized the fate of ObamaCare as “uncertain.” She also reported that progressives—aghast at the thought of ObamaCare being ruled unconstitutional, and thereby sound its demise—were ready with a second prong of attack. The Obama front group, Know Your Care/Protect Your Care, which we discuss in detail below, planned to “throw out its playbook,” Gardner reported, and “would devote its time in the fall to going negative on the court itself—painting the conservative justices as partisan ideologues who robbed Americans of needed benefits.”16
Ever impatient, President Obama jumped the gun to lead an early attack. In an April 2 speech, Obama had the “unmitigated gall,” as American Thinker contributor Fay Voshell put it, to warn the “unelected” Supreme Court (Obama’s words) that it had better rule in his favor. Obama, Voshell added, “revealed not only his hypocrisy, but the extent [to which] he will go to in order to preserve the key accomplishment of his administration. He seems fully to intend to intimidate the Court into rubber-stamping the Affordable Care Act of 2010 as constitutional.”17
OBAMACARE RESET VERSION 2.0
While the Center for American Progress has been deeply involved in drafting and promoting all of the legislative efforts by Barack Obama and progressives in Congress, CAP was most staunchly supportive of Obama’s health care plan. CAP now is also deeply involved in the campaign to save ObamaCare. At a mid-April 2011 press conference in Washington, D.C., Duval Patrick, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, CAP’s president, Neera Tanden, and Jim Doyle, the former Democratic governor of Wisconsin, jointly announced the launch of the Know Your Care and Protect Your Care (KYC/PYC) public relations efforts.18 (Recall that Patrick has been a spokesman for Obama’s reelection campaign.) Patrick alleged that ObamaCare was “under attack by well-coordinated and well-funded organizations that spread misinformation in order to take away people’s benefits by repealing health care.” He told reporters:
This campaign will be an aggressive effort designed to explain and promote these rights as well as protect against other attacks such as attempts to privatize Medicare and Medicaid.19
Writers at the Huffington Post claimed the catalyst for the Patrick-Tanden-Doyle so-called counteroffensive was the 2011 budget proposal of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which the U.S. House had passed prior to its Easter 2011 recess. According to Huffington Post’s Michael McAuliff and Sam Stein:
The Republican Party’s endorsement of sharply conservative prescriptions to fix ailing state and federal budgets is threatening to reunite the progressive movement and heal its disillusionment with the Democratic Party.
Over the past week, an informal coalition of non-government groups has plotted ways to make town halls increasingly uncomfortable for Republican lawmakers—a coordination that is more advanced than previously reported.
One of the main groups in this coalition is KYC/PYC. McAuliff and Stein wrote that support for KYC/PYC was “being provided from D.C.-based organizations with an eye towards expanding the echo chamber … Still, it’s difficult to dismiss both the synchronicity and glee with which these groups have operated,” the Huffington Post writers concluded. In particular, they named the Obama-allied group, Americans United for Change, which, they wrote, “has become the de-facto organizer of the movement.” (More on AUC below.) They also reported that CAP had “sent trackers to film various events” such as town hall forums. In addition, they reported that a third entity, a Democrat-oriented consulting firm called New Media Partners, had “pitched these same ev
ents to local and national reporters in search of more earned-media.” (We did not find New Media Partners named in conjunction with KYC/PYC in any other reports.)
And, of course, Big Labor is involved: the SEIU and the union-affiliated Health Care for America Now (HCAN)—“two entities deeply invested in fighting Ryan’s vision of Medicare reform, took the lead on field operations.” They were backed by the Soros-funded MoveOn.org, AFSCME, the Social Security Campaign, and “other groups.”20
A central question is: whence cometh the money for the gigantic Save ObamaCare campaign we are about to describe to you? Aside from pointing out the host of deep-pocketed backers listed above, no one we know of has yet traced the precise money trail. When you read how many high-powered—and high-priced—progressive political operatives are involved in this campaign, you will understand that its price tag runs into many millions of dollars. How many millions it is impossible to know at this juncture, let alone the sources of those millions. But the enormous scope of the progressive effort to save ObamaCare—probably the costliest and most unpopular expansion ever of government power—makes clear that its proponents are sparing no effort or expense to defend it.
All this comprises a major shift towards more offensive tactics. During the 2009 and 2010 sell of ObamaCare to the American public, more subtle messaging had been used. As we wrote in Red Army, a major coalition called the Herndon Alliance—whose sole purpose had been to soft-sell a government takeover of American health care (and which is also part of this new effort)—had helped politicians “to sell the American public on ObamaCare by crafting appealing, moderate language to sell a radical plan.”21 Now that ObamaCare is already law—though in a certain amount of legal and political jeopardy—the more aggressive KYC/PYC “will push back against what is expected to be an onslaught of ads financed by the conservative groups and targeting the health care law,” wrote Michael D. Shear in the New York Times.22 “Technically,” explained Stephen Koff in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Protect Your Care half of KYC/PYC—which is chartered by the IRS as a 501(c)4 organization—is “all about defending” ObamaCare, and can “participate in political activity to defend the bill.” But its sister organization, Know Your Care, is a 501(c)3 group whose “focus is education,” Koff added.23 So PYC is free to work with the Obama administration and members of Congress on “policy issues,” especially those connected with Obama’s reelection campaign. However, PYC “may not coordinate with the politicians on their elections,” Koff wrote. For its part, PYC is clear about its purpose: It “will create the political and media space for elected officials, industry leaders and community advocates to champion the Affordable Care Act and hold accountable those who seek to take those benefits away by repealing or defunding the law.”24
POWER COALITION
Clearly, the Obama administration, progressives in Congress, and progressive groups and unions are very worried. But they are also stunningly well prepared for a fight. It’s all hands on deck with an army of big-name political operatives working overtime. Perhaps not intending to be so revealing, the New York Times account reported: “A collection of Democratic and labor operatives have left their organizations to form a pair of independent groups [KYC/PYC] with the mission of defending the health care overhaul championed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats during 2009 and 2010.” In fact, this “collection” includes several individuals with close ties to the Obama administration. The number of high-powered political operatives working for KYC/PYC read more like a presidential campaign team than it does any “grassroots” operation:
• KYC/PYC’s senior advisor Neera Tanden, according to her CAP bio, served as a senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services. She advised secretary Kathleen Sebelius and worked on Obama’s White House health reform team to pass the ObamaCare bill. “In that role she developed policies around reform and worked with Congress on particular provisions of the legislation.”25
Tanden served as director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign, where she managed all domestic policy proposals.
Tanden is also closely connected with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was policy director for Clinton’s presidential campaign and was legislative director for then senator Clinton, “where she oversaw all policy in the Senate office.” During her New York senatorial campaign, Tanden was Clinton’s deputy campaign manager and issues director. Earlier, during the Clinton administration, Tanden served as associate director for domestic policy and as a senior policy advisor to the first lady.
Tanden has been with CAP since its launch in 2003. She served as CAP’s vice president for academic affairs and joined as its senior vice president for domestic policy.
• KYC/PYC’s campaign manager is Tanya Bjork, who most recently served as director of federal affairs for Governor Jim Doyle. Bjork “managed the state’s federal priorities” and served as the Doyle administration’s “chief liaison with the White House, federal agencies, Congress and other governors.”26
Bjork also served as the Wisconsin state director for the Obama campaign, regional director for EMILY’s List, regional political director for the AFL-CIO, and as a senior campaign staff member for the late senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and former senator Russ Feingold (D-WI).27
• Senior advisor Paul Tewes is a partner in political consulting firm New Partners. Additionally, Tewes and his partner, Steve Hildebrand, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, operate the Washington, D.C.–based political campaign consulting firm Tewes-Hildebrand. Both are considered among Obama’s top advisors.28
Tewes worked as coordinated campaign director in 2001–2002 at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and as its political director in 2003–2004. Eventually, he became political director of the DSCC before moving on to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.29 Tewes was Obama’s state director for the Iowa caucuses, where Tewes and his team “built the largest grassroots organization in history, culminating in a win that launched Obama’s historic campaign.” Obama later appointed him as head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).30
• KYC/PYC’s finance adviser is Ami Copeland, also a partner in New Partners.31 Copeland “managed and helped build the most successful political fundraising operation in history” as deputy national finance director for Obama’s presidential campaign during the primary and as senior finance adviser to the DNC.32
Previously, in 2001–2002, Copeland worked as a political fundraiser for the successful reelection campaign for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IO). In 2003, Copeland raised contributions as the Midwest regional finance director for the DSCC, after which he was recruited by former majority leader Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SC), as his deputy national finance director for his reelection campaign, 2003–2004, and by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) as his finance director in his successful reelection campaign, 2005–2006.33
• KYC/PYC’s original communications director was Eddie P. Vale, who worked for the AFL-CIO as political communications director. Previously, in the 2008 campaign cycle, Vale served as communications director for the IE group, Progressive Media USA, and for John Edwards’s presidential campaign in New Hampshire.34
Vale told the Boston Globe in April 2011 that PYC did not have to disclose its donors. Both groups, he said, could “run television and radio ads in key races, as well as send out mailings and make phone calls to voters.” At the time, an “official involved in the groups” told the Globe a combined $5 million had been raised to date.35
Sam Stein noted in the Huffington Post: “How the organizations will structure their operations or spend their money isn’t entirely clear. Officials at the launch were coy with strategy and plans, stressing only that Know Your Care/Protect Your Care will be informative in nature, will be active in races and will work through the 2012 election until the major components of the law are implemented in 2014.”36
• In September 2011, Darden Rice moved up from communications director at Progress Florida fo
r KYC/PYC to become the groups’ new communications director. At the time, KYC/PYC were in Orlando, protesting “threatened cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”37 A well-known Florida political figure, Rice was president of the League of Women Voters in the St. Petersburg area, and previously served as national field coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities Campaign and as the Florida-based representative at the Sierra Club.38
• Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, is a KYC/PYC media consultant. Currently, Margolis not only represents Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), but also “more Democratic senators than any other consultant in the nation.”39 A senior partner at GMMB, a Washington-based political consulting, advertising, and communications firm, Margolis was a key strategist in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.40
• David DiMartino, a partner at Blue Line Strategic Communications, is a communications adviser for the groups. He held senior communications positions in national campaign organizations, including the DSCC in 1999–2000 and for the 2003–2004 presidential primary for Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). He also served on Kerry’s staff.41
• John Anzalone, a partner at Anzalone-Liszt Research, is KYC/PYC’s pollster. In 2008, Anzalone “helped build a firm that helped elect Barack Obama as President.”42 Anzalone conducted polling during the health care and financial reform debates for the Common Purpose Project, HCAN, and Americans United for Change. He “works regularly with the DCCC, DSCC and the DGA on their candidate recruitment and independent expenditure programs.”43
