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health / Stones & Bones / volume 10 number 3, March 2008 DOSE OF REALITY Lobbying seems to be an accepted part of our political culture. The knowledge that our municipalities, boroughs, industries, and other special interest groups feel compelled to hire lobbyists to influence our elected officials and government workers seems not to bother us at all. Each of us can, as individuals, try to influence the political process by writing letters or otherwise communicating directly with our state officials, but we seem to accept the idea that there is another legitimate way to exert influence. We can hire professionals—those people called lobbyists—to do the work for us. Seems sad in a way, but that is the way it is. One nice thing about lobbying is that the available information about it reveals what is important to us and various special interests in our society. This information is available for Alaskans because the Alaska Public Offices Commission requires that lobbyists and employers of lobbyists report what money is paid to lobbyists and for what purposes. The commission publishes its results, and the latest report now available is for the year 2006. This report tells who the lobbyists are and how much their employers paid them in direct salaries and expenses. It gives information on the amounts of money spent in providing general in-house support to the lobbying efforts. That includes entertaining and paying for trips of public officials and legislative employees, and also costs involved in urging other persons to enter into communication with those being lobbied, telemarketing and letter-writing campaigns, conducting push-pull polls, and media advertising. That last item can be fairly major, as all those full-page ads in the newspapers by ConocoPhillips and others suggest. It should come as no surprise to any Alaskan that the largest employer of lobbyists in the state is the oil and gas industry. In 2006, that industry spent just under $4 million in direct salaries and expenses for fifty-two lobbyists operating under sixty-two separate contracts, plus another $8 million for support functions, mainly media advertising. However, it might come as a surprise that the next biggest lobbying category is health care, right at $2 million in direct salaries and expenses for forty-two lobbyists operating under fifty-eight separate contracts with their clients. The cost of lobbying for health care issues easily exceeds that for the other major categories: municipal issues ($1.6 million), electrical and other utilities ($890,000), and telecommunications ($850,000). These numbers tell us that health care in Alaska is a major industry, second only to the oil and gas industry. The total annual expenditure for health care in Alaska is right at $5 billion, and that is why we have forty-two health care lobbyists in Juneau seeking to influence where that money goes. If we look at health care lobbying in more detail we see that in 2006 the pharmaceutical industry expended $185,000 to hire nine Alaska lobbyists. Various Alaska medical associations collectively hired fourteen lobbyists at a cost of $334,000. Alaska hospitals and other health care providers hired sixteen lobbyists, expending $778,000; and health insurance companies hired six lobbyists, paying them a total of $148,000. Also, various societies having interest in health care hired thirteen lobbyists, expending $552,000 for direct salaries and lobbyist expenses. Individual contracts for health care lobbying ranged up to over $100,000 each; most were in the range $20,000 to $80,000, and a few were for less than $10,000 each. Several of the lobbyists simultaneously represented two or more health care clients while also representing clients in other areas. By representing several clients simultaneously, some lobbyists are able to earn rather comfortable livings. Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry lobbyists do better than most. Thirteen of the oil and gas lobbyists in 2006 had clients paying them over $100,000 each, and lobbyist Paul Quesnel had a client (BP Exploration, Alaska) who paid him over $300,000 for his efforts during 2006. That year, another lobbyist, Lawrence Markley, earned $779,000 while representing an incredible twenty-four separate electrical utility clients who paid him fees ranging from $18,000 to $46,500 each. In 2003, there were 214 lobbyists working in Alaska. Inthat year, however, the law was changed to lower the requirements on lobbyist reporting. The change required only 140 to report as lobbyists in 2004, but that still leaves more than twice the number of people we elect to the legislature. All this makes me wonder about how much impact my letter or telephone call to a legislator has on him or her compared to the daily influence of contacts with lobbyists. These people are professionals, and they know what is going on day-to-day in the passage of legislation, so they know when and where to place their influence. When it comes to giving our own input, that is hard to compete with because each of us has other things to worry about than what the legislative branch or the executive is doing day by day. Consider the fact that we pay our sixty legislators and our governor only a total of just over $2 million for salaries and per diem each year, but the oil and gas industry, the health care industry, and other special interests pay out more than $14 million—that’s seven times as much—on lobbyists to influence those elected officials’ actions. That is a lot of money, and it puts a lot of pressure on our decision-makers. It is a wonder that most of them perform as well as they do for the Alaska public. Not all of course have, and some of those are now in jail. Neil Davis is a retired geophysicist and author of several fiction and nonfiction books. Much of the material for Dose of Reality is derived from his recent book, Mired in the Health Care Morass. Neil can be contacted at neildavs@mosquitonet.com. | ||
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