During the campaign, Barack Obama promised his cheering crowds that, when he rolled up his sleeves to work on health care, he would “have insurance company representatives and drug company representatives at the table. They just won’t be able to buy every chair.” Now is the time to look at just what kind of seats special interest groups are having at Obama’s table and what they’re doing to bring the public around to their ways of thinking. This is the eleventh of an occasional series of posts that will analyze their activities and how the media are covering them. The entire series is archived here.

At the end of June, an invitation came my way to attend a virtual press conference where health care experts were to discuss “the ramifications of a public plan.” Intrigued, I RSVPed. The purpose of the call was to introduce the new “Hands Off MY Health” campaign aimed at spotlighting “the risks of government-run health care.” Call moderator Robert Goldberg explained that the campaign consisted of a “labyrinth of sites” which examine single-payer systems around the world and give some thoughts on what a public plan can and cannot do. When an operator at the beginning of the call said: “Welcome to the APCO world wide conference call,” my ears perked up.

APCO Worldwide is a super influential PR consulting firm that specializes in grassroots organizing, coalition building, and using political campaign tactics to create an environment that supports their clients’ legislative and regulatory goals. A 1995 APCO Associates pamphlet entitled “Political Support Services” says that “APCO applies tactics usually reserved for political campaigns to target audiences and recruit third-party advocates.”

Was APCO behind the convener of the press call, CMPI Advance, a newly-formed advocacy offshoot of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest? The Center advocates a free-market approach to health care, especially when it comes to drugs and medical devices; in 2006, according to Politico, its biggest contributors were Pfizer and Pharma. Sourcewatch says its advisory board includes such right-wing think tank luminaries as Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Dr. Merrill Mathews from the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, and Grace Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute.

Goldberg, the Center’s vice president and director of programs, is also well-known in conservative circles. In my book, Slanting the Story—The Forces that Shape the News, I noted that Goldberg had been instrumental in building support for legislation that weakened the FDA. In the late 1990s, he was a senior research fellow at Brandeis. Edward Hudgins, then director of regulatory studies at the Cato Institute, told me: “We try to keep a stable of academics to write things for us,” and he tried to use Goldberg as often as he could.

I knew that APCO had done work for insurance companies a few years back to help them deflect attention from the messages Michael Moore sent in his movie Sicko. APCO worked with insurers to develop a strategy for handling media and public inquiries when the movie premiered. It helped create talking points and advised industry reps to maintain that government-run health care is bad and that other governments ration care. APCO helped set up a third-party front group, Health Care America, to discredit the movie, and it monitored the mentions the group got in the press.

Could insurance company and Big Pharma fingerprints be found on the Hands Off My Health campaign, whose goal seems to be stopping a public plan (“government-run health,” in PR-speak)? According to Sourcewatch, APCO’s clients have included Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Roche, and Pharma. And after all, insurers and drug companies are not exactly friends of a public plan option.

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