It’s sinking in now, and I’m finding myself getting angrier and angrier about this 2009 $86 million campaign by the American Health Insurance Plans working through the US Chamber of Commerce to stop the Health Care legislation. And I’m betting that the same combo was active for the midterms. 
On this blog, I’ve been ranting about the interference of the Pharmaceutical Industry in medicine in general, and academic medicine in specific, but these numbers dwarf that interference. How much health care could’ve been delivered for $86 million? What does the US Chamber of Commerce have to do with Health Care? How did this convenient non-reporting, no limit campaign decision conveniently come from the Supreme Court just in time for the Healthcare debate and the 2010 Midterm Elections? This really stinks to high heaven…Large corporate donations help U.S. Chamber of Commerce influence politics: Analysis
New York Times
by ERIC LIPTON, MIKE McINTIRE and DON VAN NATTA JR.
October 21, 2010Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations. Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed new rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities. And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has helped wage a national campaign to limit the ability of trial lawyers to sue businesses.
These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections. Such donations suggest that the recent allegations from President Barack Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding U.S. companies eager to enlist it, anonymously, to fight their political battles and pay handsomely for its help.
And these contributions, some of which can be pieced together through tax filings of corporate foundations and other public records, also show how the chamber has increasingly relied on a relatively small collection of big corporate donors to finance much of its Washington agenda. The chamber makes no apologies for its policy of not identifying its donors. It has vigorously opposed legislation in Congress that would require groups like it to identify their biggest contributors when they spend money on campaign ads.
Proponents of that measure pointed to reports that health insurance providers funneled at least$10 million$86 million to the chamber last year, all of it anonymously, to oppose Obama’s health care legislation. "The major supporters of us in health care last year were confronted with protests at their corporate headquarters, protests and harassment at the CEO’s homes," said R. Bruce Josten, the chief lobbyist at the chamber, whose office looks out on the White House. "You are wondering why companies want some protection. It is pretty clear"…
Last week, I saw a blurb headline on Huffington Post but didn’t read the article, saying something like Obama wants to make amends with the Chamber of Commerce? Doesn’t sound like he ought to be trying to make nice with such “enemies of the people.”