Obamacare Creator Leaves White House Job for Lobbying Role with Big Pharma

“A key figure involved in designing the president’s signature health insurance mandate referred to as Obamacare has left her role at the White House to work for one of the very companies profiting off the bill she helped create.

Elizabeth Fowler will be leaving her role as the special assistant to the president for healthcare and economic policy at the National Economic Council and joining pharmaceutical giants Jonson & Johnson. The Washington, DC newspaper POLITICO confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that Fowler is leaving her position on Pennsylvania Avenue for “a senior-level position leading ‘global health policy’” at the pharma company’s government affairs and policy group.

While Fowler’s exit from the White House is but one more entry on the list of Obama staffers that have traded in their executive office access for a lobbying role, her use of the every-spinning revolving door is of particular significance since she is likely to benefit directly from the very legislation she helped create.

“If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer,” POLITICO’s Carrie Budoff Brown wrote in 2009.

When Fowler was profiled by the paper at the time, she was described as a key player in health care discussions, and not just under President Barack Obama either. POLITICO notes she worked from 2001 through 2005 with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) while he negotiated the Medicare Part D prescription drug program in Washington. During the second George W Bush administration, she left politics to pursue a position in the private sector, only to rejoin Baucus in 2008 to construct what became known as Obamacare.

“People know when Liz is speaking, she is speaking for Baucus,” Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), told POLITICO at the time.

As the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reports this week, Baucus was the “key legislator” involved in drafting the bill, which he himself went on the record to thank Fowler for….”

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