Washington is a strange city. You’re confronted with billboards for things normal humans can’t buy, like fighter jets. Small groups of lobbyists cluster in corners of office buildings and swap inside information in hushed tones. And there are the invites. Loads upon loads of invites to seminars and open-bar events and celebrations, all for obscure reasons. Washington trades on these invites. While at a glance they can seem confusing or meaningless, they typically have an ulterior motive. You can build a story around the real and sometimes insidious reasons for the gathering. The Prospect gets a lot of these emails, and each week, we’re going to share one of them with you, and take you inside what might be going on behind the scenes.
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CVS Health owns a market-leading pharmacy; a top middleman firm called Caremark that negotiates prices on prescription drugs and reimburses pharmacies; the insurance company Aetna; and a growing number of “minute clinics” that operate as primary-care offices. The new HealthHub stores position CVS as a leader in managing chronic diseases. They’re slightly self-interested on the subject of health care.
So when you see CVS Health sponsoring a Politico panel on “how to make navigating the health care system more effective,” you should already be quite skeptical. Yet this kind of back-scratching is common in Washington.
The panel discussion, scheduled for this morning a couple of blocks from the White House, features a top official at the “National Patient Advocate Foundation.” While patient advocacy sounds like a benign and even useful way to push back against the concentrated power of the health care industry, considering the underwriter of the panel you shouldn’t really expect the people’s voice to be present. And indeed, a Project on Government Oversight report on patient advocacy groups from 2016 reveals that almost all of them receive extensive funding from the drug industry. Sure enough, the National Patient Advocate Foundation gets money from the pharmaceutical trade group PhRMA’s charitable foundation. (See page 90 of the linked document.)
Other speakers include liberal member of Congress Mark DeSaulnier, an adviser to an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, and the CEO of Wellbe, a “digital solutions provider” for patients. You can expect the discussion to trend toward how to make everything easier for sick people, which dovetails rather nicely with CVS’s vision of the 70 percent of Americans who live within three miles of one of its drugstores popping in to fill prescriptions, get screening for asthma or hypertension, and manage all their health care needs. The content of the panel marries the form of what CVS wants out of health care. And having a member of Congress there, getting unconsciously lobbied through his participation, doesn’t hurt.
Politico is an incredibly successful organization. It doesn’t need CVS’s help to rent out a room for an hour at the W Hotel on a Wednesday morning, just as it doesn’t need Bank of America or Goldman Sachs or whoever else’s help to put out a Playbook newsletter. Politico is in business to make money, and since digital ads aren’t terribly lucrative, it sells its information mechanism, the kind of thing any news organization should be wary of doing. So corporations sponsor breakfasts and panel discussions that coincidentally happen to align with their long-term goals, and Politico, which could just opt to inform and still have plenty of opportunity to maintain a viable business, goes along with it. We should ask why.
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