Joe Conason wrote a story today detailing Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh’s spouses and their conflicts of interest working for giants in the health care and pharmaceutical industry. And it’s true. Evan Bayh’s wife Susan is on the corporate board of WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance company, as well as several pharmaceutical concerns. Joe Lieberman’s wife Hadassah is a senior counselor at the lobby firm Hill & Knowlton, working for clients in the health care and pharmaceutical sectors.

This may have some bearing on their stances on health care reform, although in Lieberman’s case, he’s not a Democrat, he supported Republicans in the past, he plans to support Republicans in the future, and he basically lives to “feel relevant”.

But the concerns about Bayh and Lieberman’s wives represent one degree of separation. Incredibly, very little has been made of the fact that Ben Nelson, the conservative Senator from Nebraska, has spent his entire career in the insurance industry and, more than anyone else, shares their concerns far beyond the concerns of his own constituents. Nelson appeared on MSNBC today and the interviewer never even pointed out that he was an insurance industry executive. But it’s true.

Christopher Hain, a former investigative journalist for the Lincoln Journal Star, wrote an article around the time that Nelson was running for US Senate in 2000, which detailed Nelson’s career in the insurance industry and his deep ties with it. This quote makes it seem like he actually sees the insurance industry, and his involvement in it, as necessarily virtuous:

As a graduate philosophy student, Nelson discovered a similar calling when he landed a job at the state Department of Insurance.

“I really attached to the idea of insurance as the idea of a philosophical and economic social contract,” Nelson said.

Frank Barrett, the insurance director who hired Nelson and became his mentor, explained how this idea translates to Nelson’s Democratic politics.

“It’s our responsibility to look after those who are poor in coin, poor in health and poor in spirit,” Barrett said. “I think Ben feels very strongly that is the role of mankind and government.”

Nelson left the Department of Insurance in Nebraska to become assistant general counsel for Central National Insurance Group of Omaha. He was then chosen in 1975 by Gov. James Exon as state insurance director. He left that job within a year to become the executive VP at Central National, and a year later he became president of the company, raking in millions and bringing with it the mentality of insurance as a noble and salutary profession. He then became the executive vice president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, an ad hoc group of insurance regulators from around the country that is frequently derided as wholly beholden to industry interests. His few years as a lawyer were mostly consumed with insurance law. His campaign donation list includes over two million dollars from health care and insurance company interests during his time in federal office.

It’s not that Nelson, as the most conservative Senator in the Democratic caucus, wouldn’t be a problem on any big progressive legislation – just today he vowed that cap and trade will not pass Congress. But when it comes to health care issues, Nelson can simply be expected to ally with the insurance industry that made him his fortune and continues to bankroll him to this day.