It’s the start of a new week so that must mean a brand new Obama regime scandal! This HHS scandal is actually the second in that department. It’s already been revealed that Kathleen Sebilius has been illegal soliciting donations from companies for fund ObamaCARE. Now, there’s also insider trading going on in Obama’s HHS:
Is this scandal number five or number six? There’s Benghazi, the IRS, the DOJ snooping on reporters, Sebelius shaking down health executives for ObamaCare contributions, and now the NSA/PRISM/Snowden mega-clusterfark.
Actually, there are two potential scandals here. One is HHS tossing around what was supposed to be sensitive information to a huge swath of employees in-house. The other scandal is who actually leaked it, assuming anyone did. It might not have come from HHS at all but rather from some old-fashioned Beltway congressional/lobbyist incest. As with most of the other Obama scandals, this story is less about O himself than about the foreseeable abuses that result as the federal whale grows. You can have bigger government or you can have more accountable government. The guy who signed ObamaCare into law has made his choice.
A brokerage firm in D.C. announced late in the trading day on April 1 that a decision to boost funding for Medicare Advantage was forthcoming. Shares of Humana and Aetna skyrocketed. Later that day, after the markets had closed, the feds confirmed that, indeed, another $8 billion would be plowed into the program. So who at HHS blabbed? Maybe no one: Per WaPo and this WSJ report from a few weeks ago, the feds seem to be interested in a lobbyist who — ta da — used to work as a health-care policy advisor to Chuck Grassley himself and who now specializes in “political intelligence.” (He also had a “role” in writing ObamaCare, per the WSJ, and used to work on health-care legislation with someone who’s now a “senior official” at CMS, the division of HHS that made the decision on increasing funding for Medicare Advantage.) The SEC knows he was communicating with at least one current staffer in Grassley’s office; the question is whether that staffer slipped the information on the Medicare decision to the lobbyist or whether the lobbyist somehow “guessed” that Medicare funding would be increased based on tidbits of info he gleaned from various sources on the Hill. Even if it’s the latter, with no one having directly fed him confidential information, the surge in Humana/Aetna shares based on his analysis is a direct result of his access to government’s major players. When a former Grassley advisor and colleague of a bigwig at CMS tells you that he thinks a windfall’s coming, you listen. Big government takes care of its alumni.