A possible candidate for Senator Kennedy’s seat has spent the last ten years building the biggest pharmaceutical lobbying practice in the country.

Nick Littlefield is chair of the lobbying group at Boston law firm Foley Hoag, which has raced to the top of the pharma lobbying charts over the last several years. In the first half of 2009, the firm raked in $2.6 million from pharma — more lobbying cash from pharmaceutical interests over the course of six months than any law firm in history, according to a review of lobbying data from Open Secrets.

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Still more evidence that Wellpoint wrote the Baucus plan: the insurance company’s lobbying efforts in DC are headed up by Senator Mike Enzi’s former chief health adviser at Senate HELP, Stephen Northrup. Enzi is a member of Baucus’s so-called “Gang of Six” shaping the bipartisan compromise bill.

In fact, key provisions in the Baucus plan apparently draw on industry-inspired legislation first introduced by Enzi in 2006, while Northrup was still his chief health aide.

Consumer Watchdog first called attention to the similarities, particularly with respect to a part of the plan that would help insurance companies avoid state regulation:

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Last week, I noted that the key Baucus healthcare staffer is a former insurance executive. Now, Liz Fowler’s stint at Wellpoint is getting some more attention, as her electronic fingerprints have been found on the Senator’s new healthcare plan. Not surprising, as she’s the top health staffer in Baucus’s office, but the symbolism is rich: it’s as if Wellpoint wrote the Baucus plan.

Some more evidence of Wellpoint’s influence: Michelle Easton, Baucus’s top health aide prior to Fowler, is currently lobbying for Wellpoint.

While Fowler was at Wellpoint, Easton was the top healthcare staffer in Baucus’s office. Now, the roles are reversed. As a principal at the healthcare lobbying firm Tarplin, Downs, and Young, Easton is also lobbying for PhRMA, Amgen, and Wyeth. Before working for Baucus, she was a top lobbyist at PhRMA.

Both Fowler and Easton leveraged their work on the Medicare reform bill of 2003 to take lucrative jobs in the healthcare industry, at Wellpoint and PhRMA, respectively. Fowler played a crucial role in forging that compromise, according to the Hill:

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Just when you thought the Baucus revolving door couldn’t spin faster: the Senate staffer responsible for devising the tax policies at the heart of the Baucus plan is a former lobbyist for health insurance and pharmaceutical interests, including an insurance industry front group.

Cathy Koch, who heads the Senate Finance committee’s tax department, was director of global government affairs at pharmaceutical company Amgen until early 2007. Before that, she worked at Ernst and Young, where she lobbied on behalf of a number of large insurance and pharmaceutical companies, including Aetna, Blue Cross, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer.

Tax incentives and calculations are central to health care reform plan that Baucus sent to members of the Gang of Six this weekend, including a penalty on health insurance companies offering expensive plans. The “Cadillac” plan tax has received significant media attention as a particularly important and controversial feature that targets insurance companies.

But was it designed by one of their own?

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@ddwriter was the runaway winner of our Lobbyist Editing Challenge with 2,827 points. In addition to winning a LittleSis t-shirt and books, her other prize was to be featured on this blog. So here she is, the woman behind the glasses:

Diana Dominguez is a self-described pitbull. As a debt collector for many many years, she prided herself on her ability to find anyone. “If I can’t find something, I just keep digging, digging, and digging,” she said. She is also writing a series of mystery novels, for which she does a lot of research. So when she got an email about being part of the Huffington Post Investigative Unit’s team to identify 500 former congressional staffers turned health care lobbyists, she jumped at the chance. The project didn’t only appeal to her curious side, but to her family life. Both of her adult sons are without health care.

Her youngest son recently moved to Texas and when he needs medical care, he goes to clinics with long waits. “He’s basically flying without a net,” Dominguez said. Her eldest is 31 and a waiter. He’s been 10 years without health insurance and has paid for it dearly with a few hospital visits that he’s still in debt from. He has two children, who have insurance through his wife, but Dominguez still worries about her son.

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Friday ended our first ever analyst challenge, and we here at LittleSis couldn’t be happier with the results. In just a few weeks, our analysts identified 450 former congressional-staffers-turned-healthcare-lobbyists! And we certainly could not have hit that number without the work of our contest winners: @ddwriter, @Priscilla and @Reed.Young.  These three analysts went above and beyond and to reward them, their prizes are in the mail!

So what did we find?  The trends the LittleSis database identified were pretty interesting.
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Senator Max Baucus’s chief health adviser, Elizabeth Fowler, has been called the “chief operating officer” of the healthcare reform process by Politico — the staffer who sets legislative deadlines, coordinates with the White House on policy, and is understood to speak for Baucus on health policy issues. Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein has called her the most influential health staffer in the Senate.

Fowler, as it turns out, is also fresh off a lucrative stint working for the insurance industry: from 2006 to 2008, she was VP of public policy for Wellpoint, the insurance giant.

That’s right, an insurance industry hack is the quiet name directing the healthcare reform process on Capitol Hill.

It gets worse. Baucus’s chief health advisor prior to Fowler, Michelle Easton, currently lobbies for Wellpoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, & Young.

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Six centrist Senators got some attention from the New York Times today for their role in shaping health care reform. Never mind that the room is small and the “debate” couldn’t be framed more narrowly; Senator Olympia Snowe tells us that Max Baucus, the ringleader, is “very inclusive.”

The story includes an annotated photograph of the negotiations in process:

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As the health care fight intensifies, a wide range of research and journalism initiatives are taking a closer look at the special interests seeking to influence upcoming legislation. One of the more innovative efforts is the Health Care Investigative Unit, a project of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. We’re pleased to announce that starting this week, LittleSis will be partnering with the HCIU as it follows the money in the healthcare debate and tracks lobbyists’ connections to Congress.

The HCIU is mobilizing a team of citizen journalists to dig deeper on the key players in the healthcare debate:

The true influence of lobbyists, health care companies, and special interest groups is unprecedented as this historic battle looms. The Health Care Investigative Unit’s large-scale, citizen-powered effort will cover this influence from new perspectives and unearth new facts about how Congress really makes decisions.

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The healthcare reform fight is heating up on Capitol Hill, pitting the health insurance industry, big pharma, the docs, the hospitals, the medical tech industry, and the biotech industry against…well, I’m not exactly sure. A very scary coalition of uninsured people, the middle class, unions, and liberal think tanks? Perhaps the lines are not so clearly drawn, as the AMA has been unclear about its position on the public option (a government health insurance plan).

One group that is clear in its opposition to the most significant reforms on the table is America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Led by Karen Ignagni, AHIP is the main lobby for the health insurance industry. According to the Globe, Ignagni has been doing a decent job of convincing people that her lobby is not pure evil. She has also paid off quite a few politicians, says the Center for Responsive Politics in a recent blog post.

There’s no question who AHIP works for, though there’s some question as to who works for AHIP. Yesterday, noticing that Ignagni and the AHIP board had been added to LittleSis, but no other staff, I tried to find out who the key staffers at AHIP are, other than Ignagni.

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