For most of today, TIME magazine and the Aspen Institute ran a conference on healthcare reform just a few blocks from the Capitol, an event funded by lobbying group PhRMA and foreign pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. The "symposium" was billed as "a series of can't miss conversations" featuring "Tom Daschle, Richard Gephardt and other health care leaders to diagnose health care reform battle in final days of the debate."
Instead, this TIME/Aspen Institute event was a who's who of the pharmaceutical industry lobby, with Tom Daschle thrown in for good measure. Not only did the event welcome lobbyists and their opinions with open arms and little disclosure, it literally acted as an on-the-clock opportunity for Gephardt to lobby.
How do I know? Gephardt has said just as much on his firm's website, which states, "on behalf of our client CAMI, Dick Gephardt joined other health care leaders to diagnose health care reform." Good luck finding a reference to the PhRMA offshoot CAMI anywhere in the Aspen Institute/TIME magazine promotional materials, however.
In fact, here's the description the organizers offer for the panel discussion with Gephardt, moderated by a TIME "senior editor", titled "The Payoff of Medical Research Reform":
Medical science research holds great promise in the delivery of cures and the prospects for economic recovery. How do we maintain a focus on innovation and risk-taking even as we seek to avoid more expensive health care? Our panelists discuss the potential of biomedical research beyond the act of discovery.Note there's no reference there to the actual payoff going on-- Gephardt's take home from presenting his lobbying agenda (You can find more information on CAMI and Gephardt's work for them in my recent feature in The Nation).
A few months back, many in Washington's press corps were giddy to eviscerate The Washington Post for a proposed series of off-the-record "salons" between reporters, government officials and lobbyists at publisher Katharine Weymouth's mansion. Certainly, the Post deserved the criticism. However, it is events like this TIME/Aspen Institute "symposium" that do the real damage, allowing lobbyists, veiled in the establishment authority of TIME magazine and the non-partisan non-profit credibility of the Aspen Institute, to get a public stage from which to share their biased, self-serving "expertise". As a means of shaping public perception, that's far more powerful than any private get-together between reporters, lobbyists or government officials-- something that happens, salon or no salon, on a daily basis in DC anyway.
So, while TIME and the Aspen Institute have done something shameful and compromising (even in simply pairing themselves with a large lobbying group like PhRMA), don't expect to hear anything about it from the Washington press corps, with the exception of glowing reviews in tomorrow's papers describing how these "healthcare leaders" earnestly discussed reform.
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