UNITEDHEALTH HIRES GUIDEPOST: Insurance giant UnitedHealth Group brought on a pair of new Democratic lobbyists in October as scrutiny of pharmaceutical middlemen like UnitedHealth-owned Optum Rx ramped up, according to a newly filed disclosure. — GuidePost Strategies’ Michael Bain, a longtime Senate Appropriations aide, and Jennifer Yocham Poersch began lobbying for UnitedHealth on Oct. 1 on issues related to Medicare and Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and pharmacy benefit managers, the disclosure shows — months before the slaying of a company executive brought new attention to the health insurance industry. — In September, Optum Rx was one of three PBMs accused in an FTC lawsuit of artificially inflating insulin prices. The lawsuit came as Congress has simultaneously been crafting legislation to crack down on PBMs, which drugmakers blame for rising prices. — Our Ben Leonard reported this afternoon that the stopgap funding deal coming together this week includes a PBM overhaul. The inclusion amounts to a massive win for pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers and pharmacists that have pushed for reforms, but a major blow to the PBM industry, which said new restrictions will raise drug prices. — Even without the overhaul, the industry has taken heat from both sides of the aisle. Days after GuidePost’s work for UnitedHealth began, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged on the campaign trail to rein in the industry. The sector’s troubles didn’t evaporate with her loss, however — in a news conference Monday, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to “knock out” what he said are “horrible” pharmaceutical middlemen. THE 2-TRACK 2-STEP: “Tax lobbyists are worried Congress could endanger highly anticipated tax reform if it uses the first reconciliation bill to shore up immigration and border security funding,” The Hill’s Taylor Giorno reports. — “Tax cuts enacted in 2017 by President-elect Trump’s signature bill are set to expire at the end of next year. Lobbyists already believe it will likely take longer to pass tax reform than the GOP originally hoped, and it could take even longer if Republicans opt to hold the tax package for a second reconciliation push,” as Senate leaders have proposed. — “‘To delay is to kill,’ warned Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes tax increases. ‘And all it takes is one bad car accident or an interesting scandal, and the Republicans don’t have the majority in the House anymore.’” — To wit: The 2017 tax bill wasn’t signed into law until the end of December after Republicans got bogged down with unsuccessful attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “Republicans now have a much slimmer majority, which will have to figure out how to extend expiring provisions and fold in Trump’s campaign promises” while maintaining the support of budget hawks. — “‘Reconciliation is this two-step process: You do the resolution, and then the committees get to work,’ said Rosemary Becchi, former tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee and current shareholder at the legal and lobbying giant Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.” — “‘There’ll be debate and conversations and things like that and that’ll take some time, and if they get bogged down on any specific point, it only pushes out the next process,’ she added on the tax bill. ‘You’re not writing it from scratch, but there are new issues and new things that will come about in the process.’” WARREN EYES MUSK CONFLICTS: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is pressing Trump for “clear and transparent conflict-of-interest rules that would bind Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, during his role as a top Trump adviser,” The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer reports. — A letter from Warren to Trump’s transition “notes that regular members of the Trump Vance 2025 Transition Team operate under an ethics policy that requires them to ‘avoid both actual and apparent conflicts of interest’” and bars transition team members from working “on particular matters” involving parties that could affect their interests. What’s unclear, however, is whether Musk has pledged to abide by any kind of ethics restrictions. — “Putting Mr. Musk in a position to influence billions of dollars of government contracts and regulatory enforcement without a stringent conflict of interest agreement in place is an invitation for corruption on a scale not seen in our lifetimes,” Warren wrote to the transition, calling for “a strong, enforceable ethics plan for the world’s richest man.” — The transition didn’t address particulars about any ethics pledges Musk may have taken, dismissing Warren’s inquiry as political gamesmanship while vowing to the Post that the “Trump-Vance transition will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible.” THE POST-BIDEN SHUFFLE: Our friends over at NatSec Daily write that “resumes are flying around Washington as President Joe Biden’s national security team frantically searches for jobs once they’re kicked out of office next month.” — Despite the time-honored tradition, the current job market “seems particularly brutal, according to eight people familiar with the job search frenzy, including Biden appointees, State Department and Pentagon officials and congressional aides.” — “That may be in part because of an apparent surge in career civil servants at the Pentagon, State Department and elsewhere eyeing the exit door,” particularly as Trump vows to “gut the so-called deep state across federal agencies.” — “The top dogs won’t have problems finding cushy landing posts at top law firms, defense contractors or think tanks with vague grandiose titles like ‘distinguished fellow’ or ‘senior international adviser.’” — “But it’s a much more high stakes and cutthroat battle for jobs among the rank-and-file appointees in their early- or mid-careers,” and is compounded “by growing unease in the national security establishment over what a second Trump term will mean for the U.S. approach to global crises — and whether the president-elect will have the people needed to address them.” — Some of the most popular potential landing spots seem to be on the Hill, but “Biden officials are also eyeing influential international consulting firms that already house establishment Democrats like WestExec Advisors or Beacon Global Strategies, or think tanks for coveted senior fellow positions.” SPOTTED last night at the Blockchain Association's policy summit gala, per a tipster: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.); Reps. Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.) and Zach Nunn (R-Iowa); Reps.-elect Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.), Shomari Figures (D-Ala.) and Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.); Kristin Smith and Dave Grimaldi of the Blockchain Association; Lon Goldstein of Goldstein Policy Solutions; Kara Calvert of Coinbase; Marta Belcher of the Filecoin Foundation; and Jonathan Jachym of Kraken.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment