I think the Chamber of Commerce needs a lesson in the scientific method. Unhappy with a Business Roundtable study showing that the status quo would destroy the health care system, the Chamber of Commerce has set out to write a new study – one where the conclusion was already determined.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an assortment of national business groups opposed to President Obama’s health-care reform effort are collecting money to finance an economic study that could be used to portray the legislation as a job killer and threat to the nation’s economy, according to an e-mail solicitation from a top Chamber official.
The e-mail, written by the Chamber’s senior health policy manager and obtained by The Washington Post, proposes spending $50,000 to hire a “respected economist” to study the impact of health-care legislation, which is expected to come to the Senate floor this week, would have on jobs and the economy.
Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: “The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document.”
The more you learn about how Washington works, the more you have to laugh.
It also seems like they shouldn’t need to search very hard to hire for this position – the conservative movement seems riddled with analysts shameless enough to fix the facts around their thesis statement. The health insurance industry has already found several. Maybe they could just crib from them.
The author of the email had an amusing take:
James P. Gelfand, the e-mail’s author, confirmed its authenticity in a brief telephone conversation Sunday evening. He said the campaign against Democratic health legislation would only be launched “if that’s what it found,” but declined further comment and referred questions to a Chamber spokesman [...]
In the e-mail, Gelfand writes that the proposal was “suggested by our Congressional allies” but does not specify who those allies are. He notes that the effort has collected $30,000 of the hoped-for $50,000 from other groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, the International Franchise Association, and the Independent Electrical Contractors association, each of which had contributed $5,000, according to Gelfand’s e-mail.
That’s notable, it means that members of Congress – we can safely presume Republicans – suggested that the Chamber write a bogus study that they can wave around on the floor during a debate. Essentially, the modern Congress is not as interested in facts as they are in fact sheets.
UPDATE: At The Seminal, Michael Whitney notes that the Chamber of Commerce did essentially the exact same thing on the Employee Free Choice Act.
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I think Alan Grayson could make some fine hay with that email.
Egggszacktly!
And if we can get some names associated with it, the shaming potential is huge.
I would be very surprised if the Rs did a real study. I’ll bet the “conclusion” of the study is already written.
“collecting money to finance an economic study that could be used to portray the legislation as a job killer and threat to the nation’s economy ”
Maintaining the highest health care costs in the world (which these bills seem to do) seems to be all one needs to know in order to make the above assertion.
Edit: Where’s my chamber paycheck? Just forward it to Massa’s campaign.
James K. (”Dow 36,000″) Glassman and Kevin Hassett, call your office.
Or maybe not:
They really don’t know why respected economists are respected, do they?
well…the respected economist could sign up and write what he really thinks and still collect the fee. I’d respect that.
stupid question that I’ve had about the Chamber’s opposition to healthcare reform all along – are they out of their freaking minds? Doesn’t the Chamber represent American business at large, including the four fifths of Ameriacn business that isn’t insurance or healthcare – you know, the people getting put out of business because of the spiralling cost of healthcare? Am I missing something here or are these ideologues just failing to represent their own membership and essentially asking them to commit (literally and figuratively) suicide? Shouldn’t they begin this “research” by polling their membership? I don’t know a single CEO, proprieter or HR exec who isn’t going crazy and broke about increasing healthcare costs.
The bright side here is that, at this late, late date, the Chamber is worried enough to do something that, realistically, should have been done months ago in the course of due diligence. It may not be written yet but some of the boys are, no doubt, cobbling something together in a backroom somewhere. This is desperate and desperate is good for the prospects of Healthcare Reform.
Maybe we can get the “liberal media” interested if we pretend that the letter would embarrass liberals. By the time they realize that no liberals are involved, hopefully it will be too late and the story will be out.
A glimpse into the inner workings of The Lie Factory.
Unfortunately, genning up lies to disseminate to people with a preconceived world view goes on day in and day out.
My supposedly “genius IQ” cousin posts on facebook her dismay/disgust at the fact that healthcare reform does not include Tort Reform!! But of course does not bother to research the issue to see that tort reform, even as stated by the CBO, is not a significant part of cost cutting in health care costs.
It seems that the Chamber no longer represents small businesses or small business owners (if it never did); it clearly is a lobbying group for the richest, most powerful industries and the CEOs and CIOs and EIEIOs at the top of them.
If we’ve learned anything from the past 25 years, it’s that the richest 1% are regularly capable of inventing whole new families of financial products and services that do nothing but create temporary bubbles through which those same richest 1% pull just a little more money out of the middle-class system and into their own coffers. S&L. Real Estate. Middle-class investment in dot.com stocks. The list goes on and on, and the only pattern is that the middle class standard of living festers while the top 1% control an ever-increasing slice of the pie.
I don’t know the real answers to those questions… but one could infer that they are more beholden to (eg paid off by?) the insurance and Pharma industries… we’re talking big bucks here and they have probably been bought. Sort of like how AARP actually worked against its members’ interests in 2006 Part D reform.
As my mom said at the time, “AARP told me to sign up for Part D, so I did.” I, of course, did not know about the doughnut hole at the time or I would have talked to her about it.
Wolves in sheeps’ clothing.
Yeah, if this shit were not so freaking serious. Frankly, I can not find any humor in the way Washington works, though I wish I could.
Good point. Sometimes I think the Chamber exists to support its staffers and a small industry of paid consultants.
Interestingly, the trade associations supporting the pretend study have been running ads against the public option. Take a look at this.
I don’t buy it. Even greedy bubble makers need to be able to offer quality an affordable (to them) healthcare to their workers. Even when I was an investment banker, I valued quality healthcare plan as a perk of employment. These days, even large companies are turning to shared-cost arrangements and they are losing people and competitiveness to those decisions. Nah, this is about the Chamber getting coopted by rethugs and rethug ideology completely independently from their dues-paying members. Unfortunately, few of those members pay much attention to the lobbying work of the innocuous-sounding organizatio. to which they send their checks and renewal forms once a year.
Honestly, I don’t think that I could count the number of times that I have seen this done with “environmental reviews” in which the producers ignored data, misrepresented data, MISCOUNTED data, or basically labeled black=white “for purposes of this report’ in their definitions section or their glossary.
Some of it is ideologically driven.
Some of it is driven by fear of making a living, since generally corporate interests pay handsomely.
Some of it is driven by people so damn stupid they couldn’t operationalize a variable if it hit them on the nose. And to even do that, they’d have to know what a ‘variable’ is in the first place.
This is a long-time-tested activity.
It’s worked for years.
The good news is that this needs to be exposed so that people can see it for the craven, dishonest, delusional, fear-driven bullshit that it is.
sadly, I think you’re right. Self-perpetuating, self-justifying behavior by trade associations and the like probably explains much of what is going on here and is consistent with long-standing rethug tactics of infiltrating and then coopting conservative-ish NGOs into their own schemes.
The other good news in this post is that someone thinks they need ‘more ammo’ to fight health care reform.
I have to admit that seeing them this desperate — since what they are REALLY admitting here is, “We’re so scared sh*tless that we’re willing to put out a $50,000 budget to make our deception look shiny, prettified, and gleaming!” is that some Republicans and Blue Dogs think they need ‘more ammo’ to fight health care.
God, it puts a sh*t-eating grin on my face to think of how much fun it will be to unpack this crock of crap ;-)))
Some of those pushing for health care reform ought to start putting in their orders for pizza and beer right now so that they can fully enjoy the fun of finding the bullshit and lies — and thinking about how to expose them and ridicule them, item by item — when this thing is finally published.
This could actually be quite a lot of fun… ;-))
of course it doesn’t lower healthcare costs but it does lower health insurance costs. It is sort of obvious. If you were an insurer would you charge someone more if the top amount you had to pay out was $1 million or $250,000??
Why do these “middle class” people keep investing in things that they do not comprehend then??? I think if people of all classes would follow the common knowledge not to invest in something they don’t understand everybody would be a lot better off. Of course you have a point if the government wasn’t forcing companies to do push loans (a la Community reinvestment act) the problem would not be as large but hey they meant well.
just like Unions lobbying “on behalf” of their members which is also crap because they are wasting money as well. also repubs isn’t best to describe this chamber, it is more the fiscal conservatives from either party. Those darn people that worry about money and trying to keep our country on a solid finacial footing.
I called Alan’s office, they were very receptive.
I don’t know that it has to be individuals, the GOP moves as a herd and acts as a herd, they can take the blame for this as a herd. Who knows what other truthiness-creating the herd’s members have been up to?