The Washington Post published a poll on the special election in Massachusetts last week, as part of the Washington Post-Kaiser-Harvard poll series. The poll carried obvious implications for the health care reform debate (as did the election). And like other polls in the series, which are frequently health care-related, it was co-directed by Harvard professor Robert Blendon.

Blendon sits on the board of Assurant, an insurance company. As I’ve noted previously, Blendon consistently fails to disclose the affiliation in his healthcare polling work or in his various bios (here, here, here). It is so hard to find this affiliation noted anywhere — even his lengthy Harvard bio leaves it out — that I get the sense that Blendon feels he has something to hide.

Since Assurant has an obvious and substantial interest in healthcare reform, and Blendon’s polling work for the Washington Post frequently concerns healthcare, shouldn’t the Washington Post notify its readers of this conflict?

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In a blog post yesterday, Paul Krugman tells his readers that they shouldn’t look at a Rasmussen poll on healthcare reform in Massachusetts because “it’s Rasmussen.”  He points to a poll that he deems more accurate and trustworthy, by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Boston Globe.  The poll shows that healthcare reform in Massachusetts is actually fairly popular (Krugman supports Massachusetts-style healthcare reform).

But Krugman’s preferred poll is undermined by a significant conflict of interest:  it was co-directed by a health insurance company board member, Robert Blendon.  Blendon, a Harvard public health professor, has been on the board of Assurant since 1993, earns about $150,000 a year in this role, and is heavily invested in the insurance company.

The apparent conflict of interest was not disclosed by the Harvard School of Public Health or the Globe, so it’s not Krugman’s fault for not noticing.

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The New York Times revealed today that over 40 members of Congress read statements on the floor that parrotted talking points prepared for them by lobbyists for pharmaceutical giant Genentech. As sundin notes, the story is a must-read and perhaps “all too believable,” given the way Washington works.

But the Times misses a key piece of the puzzle: two of the Genentech lobbyists at the firm that wrote the pharma-friendly talking points are ex-staffers to Anna Eshoo and Joe Barton, co-sponsors of a key measure in the bill designed to benefit Big Pharma.

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The same year that Hartford Insurance settled a $20 million fraud suit with the state of New York, board member and compensation chair Paul Kirk decided to make the company’s CEO the second-highest paid executive in the insurance industry.

Today, Kirk was named Kennedy’s successor in the Senate by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal detailed Paul Kirk’s corporate ties in a post this morning, highlighting his role on Hartford Financial Services’ compensation committee and his past lobbying work for Aventis pharmaceuticals. He also noted that Kirk helped make CEO Ramani Ayer one of the most overpaid executives in the country, according to Forbes, with compensation of $9 million in 2008. The New York Times chose to report exactly none of this in an article posted this afternoon.

The Hartford is an insurance company, so it wasn’t very hard to find areas where they’ve run afoul of the law. Seriously: google “Hartford Financial” fraud. There you have it: in 2006, the company agreed to pay $20 million to settle an investigation by New York and Connecticut into fraudulent sales of retirement products:

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