Obamacare: A plan of, by and for special interests

For a law that supposedly sticks it to big business, President Obama's health care overhaul sure has a lot of industries counting on it for profits. In recent weeks, plenty of new evidence suggests Obamacare was a boondoggle for special interests.

Hedge fund honcho Larry Robbins told the crowd at the prominent Sohn Investment Conference last week to buy hospital stocks. Obamacare, Robbins argued, would boost profits for the industry.

Insurers might be in the same boat. A Bloomberg Government study released last week found insurers would lose out on a trillion dollars in revenue between 2013 and 2020 if the Supreme Court struck down Obamacare in its entirety. Most of the trillion at stake comes from federal subsidies created by Obamacare.

At a high-dollar Obama fundraiser in late April, former President Clinton told of his experience discussing Obamacare with the health care industry. Clinton described a health-sector crowd made up of insurers and providers, and said that after his defense of Obamacare, "they said, you're preaching to the saved -- even those of us who don't like certain provisions of the health care law would be mortified if it were repealed."

But at the Obamacare trough, insurers and hospitals get a far smaller portion than the drug industry, which spent more than half a billion dollars lobbying between 2009 and 2010 -- far more than any other industry.

Since the Obamacare debates began in the spring of 2009, we've known drug lobbyists had a privileged seat at the table, but we didn't know exactly what the drug industry got from the "reform" -- and just how the industry repaid Democrats.

Now the veil is lifting. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee spent the last year pressuring the White House to turn over documents relating to drug industry-White House negotiations. Last week, committee Republicans began releasing the details.

"What the hell?" then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina wrote in a Jan. 10, 2010, email to the top lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA. "This wasn't part of our deal."

Republicans are being coy in leaking the documents, and so we don't know exactly what "our deal" was at that moment, or what Messina saw as a breach, but it bolsters what we suspected -- that there was a deal between the drug industry and the administration of a president who, ironically, had run against the drug industry. ...