Buckraking

Cokie Roberts, the ABC-TV and NPR on-air personality, used to take heat from some journalists for her “buckraking” – taking money from corporate trade groups for speaking gigs. The critics – like my former boss, Chicago Tribune Washington bureau chief James Warren – had the audacity to point out that it was a gross conflict of interest to moonlight for organizations whose issues you will eventually report about. It raised a brief ruckus in the media before Roberts shrugged off the criticism and continued in her lucrative ways.

It now appears the practice has entered the mainstream. No group of companies is more reviled than the nation’s health insurers. There are about 1,300 firms belonging to the America's Health Insurance Plans, and anywhere from 2-3,000 of their executives will be in Las Vegas in June for their annual confab.

The main speaker for the meeting is former President Bill Clinton, whose efforts at health reform in the early 1990s foundered because of militant opposition from the insurance industry. I'm not surprised they've kissed and made up.

What is more surprising is the celebrities the insurance execs have lined up for their main sessions. The moderator for the first day’s panels is Susan Dentzer, the highly regarded health correspondent for PBS’s News Hour. Want to know about “The Tipping Point in Health Care”? They will hear Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker journalist, make that presentation at one of the morning sessions. In the afternoon, Fox-TV commentator and Roll Call executive editor Morton Kondracke will give the health insurance execs his outlook for health reform.

Typical of these affairs, each session is branded. So Kondracke’s talk is sponsored by Schering-Plough. Each of the other sessions is supported by major health providers – Merck-Medco, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Pasteur, Amgen. The insurance companies' annual meeting, it turns out, is sponsored by their contractors, the companies whose fees they're supposed to hold down. I guess it's all one big happy family.

I recently gave a talk at the Society of Toxicologists on conflicts of interest in science. Long after I agreed to speak (in exchange for travel money from that professional society, which is made of up of corporate and academic toxicologists, the people who study if and how chemicals are poisoning us), I received an honorarium offer from Dow Chemical Company. I refused the money. The academic bioethicist who was my counterpart on the panel accepted.

It would have been nice to pocket that extra $1,000. But how would I have felt if the next time I spoke before a group or wrote something in a magazine, I had to disclose that Dow Chemical was among my corporate benefactors? I found it a lot easier to just say no.

Now I’m wondering. The next time I turn on the News Hour and hear a report on the health insurance industry from its health care correspondent, will I hear a disclaimer from that the show’s correspondent that she has accepted speaking fees from the industry’s trade association?