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Consumer Power Report #263:
Transparency Matters

March 15, 2011

Welcome to the Consumer Power Report.

One of the easiest things for a presidential challenger to promise as he or she is running for office is “transparency.” Incumbent administrations inevitably have had certain incidents and conversations they wanted to keep out of the news, and challengers generally have no vast history of hiding information behind such barriers of privilege and protocol.

Everybody likes the sound of transparency until they actually have to abide by it. It’s easy to promise openness until you’re faced with disclosing embarrassing and potentially legally actionable information--where all politicians, in my experience, are willing to do everything and anything to keep that information from leaking out. Clamping down on such transparency isn’t a partisan issue--it’s a politician issue.

President Barack Obama is no exception to this rule. While running for the White House, Obama promised an unprecedented degree of openness on the part of his administration--among other things, promising that the debates about health care policy would occur on C-SPAN, where everyone could see them. When the White House later reneged on this deal, it prompted cringing from the press corps and anger from political independents.

At the time, there was little recourse to gain access to behind-the-scenes negotiations except for Freedom of Information Act requests. It’s notoriously easy to slow-roll these requests--currently, Health Care News has more than half a dozen requests for very specific material that have received no action of any kind for six months (more than a dozen calls to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid offices have not been returned). One thing many DC insiders cited as a key result of the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives is the oversight power of committee staff--the ability to make requests that, presumably, the administration will have to heed.

Not so fast, says White House attorney Robert Bauer. In response to a letter from the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, the White House unveiled its position on turning over documents and records related to the backroom negotiations during the Obamacare fight: No dice. The AP reports:

President Barack Obama once promised that negotiations over his health care overhaul would be carried out openly, in front of TV cameras and microphones. Tell that to the White House now.

Republican congressional investigators got the brush-off this past week after pressing for details of meetings between White House officials and interest groups, including drug companies and hospitals that provided critical backing for Obama’s health insurance expansion.

Complying with the records request from the House Energy and Commerce Committee “would constitute a vast and expensive undertaking” and could “implicate longstanding executive branch confidentiality interests,” White House lawyer Robert Bauer wrote the committee. Translation: Nice try.

Committee chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) shared his disappointment in a response--and I’d expect this back and forth to escalate to the subpoena level in short order. But the truth is, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what was promised in these backroom meetings, which may well be as embarrassing for non-White House participants as for the administration. It’d be interesting to see if these records contained the reasons why key opponents to the law seemed to go silent, and why others stood on the sidelines instead of engaging in the debate.

Isn’t it funny how “stakeholders” who gathered in rooms to hash out the future of the nation’s health policy don’t want the actual stakeholders--American taxpayers--to find out what’s being said, even when the policy fight is over?
-- Benjamin Domenech