White House's Ties to Health Care Industry Deeper Than Visitor Records Show

[depakid]

In August, the Associated Press asked the Obama White House -- which has promised to be the most transparent administration 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has ever seen -- to release information on all communications between top staff and health care industry bigwigs. The call went unanswered, so in September the AP downgraded its request to a log of health care-related visits to those same top White House officials.

On Wednesday, the White House released records of 575 such visits since Jan. 20. It catalogs meetings with 22 top Obama aides including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior advisers Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and Pete Rouse.

The list of White House guests is a real who's-who of the health care industry. It includes Billy Tauzin, chief of PhRma, the drug industry lobby; Scott Serota, president and CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield; and lobbyists from the Business Roundtable, an organization representing the policy interests of head honchos at major U.S. companies.

The AP detailed a few of the hundreds of health care meetings, and from that sampling, I figured we might find some interesting connections -- this being Washington, D.C. -- between the visitors and the White House staffers they met with. In order to more effectively analyze the ties between the people and organizations represented at these meetings, AlterNet enlisted the research skills of Kevin Connor, co-founder of LittleSis.org, a watchdog site self-styled as an "involuntary facebook for powerful people."

In our social network analysis, Connor created a list of the 30 White House visitors mentioned by name in the AP story. (You can check out organizational interlocks and figure out where they've sent their political donations to. Be sure to add and edit, as LittleSis is a crowdsourced research platform.)

Here is what we found: http://www.alternet.org/politics/144209/white_house%27s_ties_to_health_care_industry_deeper_than_visitor_records_show?page=entire

(interesting material with many outlinks and connections folks might not be aware of).