How to be a Successful US Lobby

Here is a bit from a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog:

Doctors in the United States have enormous political power. They use it to limit the supply of doctors domestically both by restricting medical school enrollment and the number of foreign doctors who can enter the country. As a result of these protectionist measures, the United States pays more than twice as much for its doctors as other wealthy countries, costing it more than $90 billion a year.

The NYT reported on the successful effort by the doctors' lobby to stop the use of government testers to determine the ability of people with different types of insurance to get appointments. The plan was to have people call doctors office and ask for an appointment saying that they have various types of insurance (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance). This would provide a basis for determining how easy it is for people get care.

The article should have pointed out that this use of anonymous testers is absolutely standard. It has been used to uncover discrimination in the issuing of loans by banks, in selling cars, and offering jobs. It would be irresponsible for the government to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programs like Medicare and Medicaid without knowing how effective they are in providing care.

Therefore when Senator Orin Hatch complained that the administration was:

"wasting taxpayer dollars to snoop into the care physicians are providing their patients,"

he was not saying anything that made sense. Presumably he was doing the bidding of the doctors' lobby.

Baker monitors the US media to catch bias and mis-reporting. In this case he points out that the NY Times refuses to point out the power of the AMA as a lobbyist group. So their report leaves readers in the dark. It is exactly this kind of "reporting" which leaves US electors blind as to real politics that governs them, i.e. corporate money and not "Tea Party" hoopla.

Oh... and this post by Dean Baker is a gem in pointing out hypocrisy by the rich and powerful:

Will Legarde Do Anything About the IMF's Bloated Pensions?

Just asking, and asking why no one in the media is asking. The Washington Post, NYT and other major news outlets have been running wild yelling about excessive public sector pensions. The median pension for a public sector worker is a bit over $20,000. In many cases this is their sole retirement income, since they are not covered by Social Security. The pensions of public sector employees has been the topic of numerous front page stories in major newspapers.

This is why it is striking that no one raised this question with the announcement that Christine Lagarde had been selected as the new director of the IMF. IMF economists are often able to retire with 6-figure salaries in their early 50s. This is likely to strike many people as unfair by itself, however it would seem especially inappropriate in an institution that has explicitly called for governments to raise the age of eligibility for much smaller pensions to 65 or even 67.

And the strangest part of it all is that no one in media is even talking about it.