Freedom Line Blog

If you’re a member of the Obama Administration who’s engaged in some official malfeasance, now is the time to come clean. With the orgy of Administration-related scandals in the news right now, there’s a decent chance no one will notice. And if they do, they’ll likely be so numb to the pervasive impropriety that they’ll just ignore it and move on. That seems to be the thinking at the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suddenly decided to become a little more forthcoming yesterday. From the New York Times:

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed on Tuesday that she had made telephone calls to three companies regulated by her department and urged them to help a nonprofit group promote President Obama’s health care law.

She identified the companies as Johnson & Johnson, the drug maker; Ascension Health, a large Roman Catholic health care system; and Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance plan.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Ms. Sebelius said she did not explicitly ask the companies for money, but urged them to support the work of the nonprofit group, Enroll America.

The group, led by former Obama administration officials, is working with the White House to publicize the 2010 health care law and help uninsured people sign up for coverage.

Here’s the deal: News of the Secretary’s freelancing had already gone public a few weeks ago, but the defense at the time was that she had only solicited money from a couple of companies that weren’t regulated by HHS. Now she concedes that she was hitting up companies under her department’s jurisdiction but wants you to believe that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Here’s the problem: Congress refused to fully fund an extensive PR campaign for Obamacare (as it should have — this is a government health program, not the rollout of a new SUV), leading a bunch of Obama flaks to create the aforementioned Enroll America. Now you have the HHS Secretary — who has the power to bring down the hammer on these companies — ever-so-gently suggesting that they “support the work” of Enroll. She could well be telling the truth about not explicitly asking them for money — because she wouldn’t have to. None of these companies need to be told outright that if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

The dissembling from HHS is bad enough, but it’s representative of a deeper problem. At every turn, Obamacare creates precisely this kind of nexus between government and the private sector. It’s an invitation to corruption. And it looks like the RSVPs are starting to come in.