John Breaux shills for Pfizer

John Breaux stumps for Pfizer. Drug Rep by Jonathan Cohn Only at TNR Online | Post date 08.16.06

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f you've ever paid attention to the political debates about health care, then you've almost certainly heard some form of the following argument: Expanding access to high-quality, affordable medical coverage would be easy if only the political extremists who dominate Washington would stop bickering and embrace middle-of-the-road compromises. It's an alluring appeal--the kind that inevitably makes pundits, and much of the public, swoon. But it's also dangerously misleading. To understand why, look no further than the man stepping forward to make the argument most loudly nowadays: John Breaux, the former senator from Louisiana.

Before retiring in 2005, Breaux was among the Senate's most famous proponents of the idea that bipartisan compromise was a virtue in itself--maybe even more famous than Joe Lieberman or Max Baucus, although Breaux generally delivered the message with more sugar than sanctimony. "The problems we're talking about cannot be solved by the far right or the far left," Breaux said in one typical flourish back in 2001. "They have to be solved from the center."

But the midpoint between the parties hasn't represented a sensible center for some time. Instead, it's become the home of conservative, even extremely conservative policy positions that could genuinely jeopardize the public good. On Social Security, for example, Breaux was a longtime advocate for establishing individual accounts--in other words, the kind of partial privatization that would have ultimately undermined the program's guarantee of financial security in retirement. On Medicare, he was, for many years, the leading proponent of a reform called "premium support"--a thinly-disguised voucher system that likely would have shifted more risk onto seniors and, ultimately, left the most vulnerable ones struggling to find affordable medical care.

Breaux's positions aligned him with a number of wealthy financial interests--which, frequently enough, were generous benefactors of his political campaigns over the years. Whether those contributions defined his ideology or the other way around is, of course, impossible to say. But few of his admirers ever seemed to even ask the question. Indeed, the failure of the two measures served primarily to cement Breaux's image as a lonely, honorable voice of reason who tried his best to overcome the cacophony of partisanship.

hich brings us to Breaux's current endeavor: A project called "Ceasefire on Healthcare." As the website explains, it's a "national, bipartisan campaign ... to increase dialogue among leading Republican and Democratic policymakers and advocates in order to develop meaningful, incremental reform to the nation's health care system." It has actually been underway for a year, and, so far, the effort has consisted mostly of speeches and other public events--which, in turn, have been popping up on c-span and filling think-tank auditoriums. Last week, the campaign also got its own blog. (That's how I first noticed it.) As the blog's initial entry explained, "Effecting meaningful policy change in Washington can be a slow, often tedious process, but Ceasefire believes there's too much we all agree on to let incremental, market-based health care reform be blocked by political rhetoric."

It's familiar rhetoric, and, alas, it masks a familiar agenda. The giveaway is right in that quote above. Note the reference to "market-based health care reform"--and how it's an area of broad agreement that would pass today if not for all that awful, divisive political rhetoric. Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. We don't all agree upon "market-based health care reform." A lot of people--myself included--think "market-based health care reform" is almost certainly a bad idea; that over-reliance on the market is precisely how we got into the trouble we are in now; and that the way to fix it is with some kind of universal health insurance system that would involve both more government spending and more government regulation. Yes, there are people who would call that position extreme. But it takes a fairly distorted view of the modern political spectrum to define the "market-based" position closer to the political center. Americans may not love big government, but, last time I checked, they're not big fans of HMOs and Big Pharma, either.

nd, speaking of the drug industry, that's the other curious--or perhaps not so curious--aspect of Breaux's high-minded appeal to bipartisanship: whose interests he really represents. Breaux surely doesn't need a speaking tour, let alone a lowly blog, to make himself a player on health care. But the p.r. campaign's very existence at least reinforces his image as a high-minded, commonsense thinker who is simply out to break through political logjams. It's one more reason why he'll pop up on the talk shows and op-ed pages if and when the next big health care debate takes place. And, more important, it's one more reason why he'll be accorded statesmanlike status.

But Breaux is not exactly a disinterested party in these debates. On the contrary, he's now a lobbyist with the high-powered Washington firm of Patton Boggs. And one of his primary areas of interest? You guessed it: health care. Sure enough, a quick look at some of the firm's clients--courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics--reveals a long list of organizations that would benefit from "market-based reforms," since such reforms generally mean less regulation and more freedom to charge higher prices. Perhaps the most vivid example is the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb, which spent nearly half a million dollars to obtain the firm's services in 2005. (No figures yet for 2006, so no way to know if it's still a client--or, for that matter, whether Breaux has personally done work on their behalf.)

Oh, and the Ceasefire campaign itself? It's being underwritten by Pfizer. In an article that appeared in PRWeek, an official from Spectrum Science, Pfizer's public affairs agency, explained, "I think the public is yearning for this. [They] are tired of seeing all the name calling [on TV]." Well, sure. But they're also tired of seeing drug companies charge so much for their drugs. And it seems pretty unlikely this campaign will do much to change that situation.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic.