Politics. The days are long. The pay is low. The emotional taxes are high. A life in politics is for people who love to solve complicated problems and do not mind every day being undeniably unique. The reward is the thing itself, the answer to a problem, whatever form it might take.
For the most part.
At the federal level, the blurring of lines between the public sphere’s duties and the private sector’s margins, began in earnest during the administration of George W. Bush and has now devolves into a seediness that repels serious public servants.
The New York Times reports that 97 federal lawmakers disclosed trades on assets that suggests use of non-public material information, a possible violation of the STOCK Act. Of course, that was before #Quad4.
And why not?
Advisors to President Obama leveraged their engineering of the Affordable Care Act into hefty VC rounds to invest on the hopes and dreams of value-based purchasing. A lot of it ending up on the dark, dead-end street called SPAC.
The “green” provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act are likely to follow the same course and arrive, ultimately, at the same fate.
My all-time favorite is former Obama health advisor and advocate of all manner of pandemic interventions, Zeke Emmanuel, now helps out at something called COVID Recovery Consulting, helping businesses reopen after the pandemic. Thanks for turning out Zeke. Could not have done it without you.
If a few people profit from service, or proximity thereto, there is every reason to expect the ambition is shared by all. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
The goose is not inclined to protest.
Policy. Capital Hill is a very big and complicated place so good luck to anyone that wants to establish a causal relationship between insider information and PA alpha.
It isn’t the right question anyway.
The right question, which was last asked in the 1960s, is why do Congress and the White House have such influence over significant chunks – most of them highly concentrated industries – of the American economy that Members of Congress and their staffs possess insider information in the first place?
The best answer is that Congress has way too much time on its hands, much like it did in the quiet of the post-War period. All that legislative muscle looking for a good work-out has found it by chasing headlines, which are often of dubious provenance, to solve problems the only way it knows how.
The drug price provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act seem to make sense if you ignore the CPI and PPI for drugs over the last several years and concentrate instead of eye-popping launch prices dutifully reported by the health policy media apparatchiks.
Now the drug industry and the government are locked together in a symbiotic relationship that requires the government to negotiate prices but not so well that they keep drugs off the market. The drug industry’s incentives are to ensure that happens by threatening high launch prices and a withhold from Medicare.
As the world gets less peaceful and more dangerous and health care as a top political concern continues its downward slide, Congress will turn its attention to more pressing matters.
Until then, some PAs are going to wring a lot of alpha out of their pharmaceutical industry positions.
Power. It is a story whose telling is long over-due but give a hand to Politico for looking closely at the cozy and potentially dangerous relationship between international NGOs that dominate the global health scene and government.
So incestuous and so powerful are the vaccine NGOs – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiative (CEPI), and the U.K’s Wellcome Trust – that it is hard to imagine the limits on their influence.
Nor is it hard to imagine that they, like the good people in the U.S. Congress, have made use of that influence. Bill Gates is very vocal about it. In a Nov. 2020 interview with Andrew Sorkin, Gates, appearing with Albert Bourla, declared that he had seen all of PFE’s vaccine data.
Ok, it isn’t like a $50B philanthropic fund isn’t all over the equity markets every day.
But hey, who at the SEC never wants another job ever and is willing to investigate?
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
Twitter
LinkedIn
