In June I wrote about this report from Health Care for America Now!, which detailed that one company, Wellpoint (Anthem) had 78% of the health insurance market in Maine.
Today, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLakedrops this bomb on MSNBC, at the 3:12 mark:
Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh's wife is on the board of Wellpoint, and so I think he's going to have a problem ... the strongly favors something that he has a financial interest in:
In we're not talking about some small financial interest. This post from Hoosier Pundit is just the tip of the iceberg, I'll reckon:
On February 2, 2006, Congress passed the Senator Bayh-sponsored long-term care legislation that would make long-term medical care insurance available to more patients.
On February 3, 2006, Susan Bayh exercised options on 20,001 shares of Wellpoint.
On May 17, 2007, two weeks before it was announced that Wellpoint's mega-CFO was stepping down for unspecified non work-related issues, Mrs. Bayh exercised options on 3,334 shares of Wellpoint.
According to SEC records, the pre-tax profit on the sale of Wellpoint stock from February 2006 to the present was approximately $1.045 million.
Mrs. Bayh also served on the boards of directors of Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a pharmaceutical company from 2000 to 2004. She left just before Cubist senior management, family members and a neighbor were all implicated in an SEC insider trading lawsuit in January, 2005.
As the debate over health-care reform intensifies, Bayh's wife is receiving lucrative payouts from some of the companies that could be most affected by that legislation.
Bayh contends the $2.1 million that his wife, Susan, earned from public health-care companies from 2006 to 2008 represents no conflict of interest. Questions persist, however, for at least two reasons. First, Evan Bayh has been unclear about his positions on many issues related to health-care reform. Second, there's the timing of Susan Bayh's rapid rise into corporate governance.
Susan Bayh, who was a midlevel lawyer for the politically active Eli Lilly and Co. while her husband was governor of Indiana, did not serve on the board of a single public health-care company until it was clear her husband was about to ascend to the U.S. Senate. Only one month before Evan Bayh was elected to the Senate in a landslide vote, his wife was appointed to serve on the board of what would become the nation's largest health insurance company -- and arguably the company with the most at stake in the health-care reform debate.
Within a few years, numerous companies recruited her, and she eventually served on the boards of eight companies. At least one of them asked her to reduce the number of boards she served on, apparently because she was spread too thin to be effective.
You have to really read it to fully appreciate the circumstances surrounding the Bayh's, and then question why he hasn't recused himself from any and all discussions involving health insurance reform.
Amazing. Sen. Bayh is on the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Max Baucus, that is eviscerating the health insurance reform plan.
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