The Associated Press is challenging Obama to fulfill his broken campaign pledge to make policy in the open rather than behind closed doors. This is especially true on the issue of healthcare, which has seen billion dollar deals made with no public input.
In cutting deals with hospitals and drugmakers, President Barack Obama is giving a private inside track to special interests that’s at odds with his promise to make policy in the open.
Obama promised Americans he would hold special interests at arm’s length — that it would no longer be business as usual in Washington. He pledged to open government and let the public and press hold his administration accountable.
And just over two months before the 2008 election, Obama promised before an audience in Chester, Va., to hash out a health care overhaul in public. “We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies,” he said then.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, the administration’s multibillion-dollar deals with hospitals and pharmaceutical companies have been made in private, and the results were announced after the fact. Both industries promised Obama cost savings in return for an expanded base of insured patients; beyond that, the public is in the dark about details.
The article goes on to compare Obama’s policymaking to that of the Bush Administration. One must wonder why Democrats aren’t questioning Obama’s shady deals after all their complaints during the Bush years.
In some ways, it resembles what his party criticized President George W. Bush for doing with oil and gas companies as Vice President Dick Cheney wrote a national energy plan in the early days of the Bush administration.
As the Bush White House did, the Obama White House is refusing to release visitor logs that would let people see everyone going in and out during the thick of discussions over major national policies.
Just as environmentalists complained they were shut out as Cheney drafted energy policy, employers now complain that the Obama administration isn’t giving them enough say in health care policy. Like the environmentalists, employers fear a new policy will come at their expense.