{"id":3644,"date":"2010-02-12T15:30:16","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T15:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3644"},"modified":"2010-02-12T15:30:16","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T15:30:16","slug":"the_legacy_of_b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3644","title":{"rendered":"The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.sunlightfoundation.com\/2010\/02\/12\/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal\/\">Paul Blumenthal<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington\u2019s mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.<br \/>\n<br \/><Br><br \/>\nOver the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration\u2019s health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president\u2019s promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it\u2014pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily\u2014is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.sunlightfoundation.com\/2010\/02\/12\/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal\/\">Paul Blumenthal<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington\u2019s mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.<br \/>\n<br \/><Br><br \/>\nOver the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration\u2019s health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president\u2019s promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it\u2014pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily\u2014is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,21,39,18,33,9,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3644"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}