Top Obamacare Critic's
Op-Eds Drafted by PR Firm That Reps Drug, Health Care Clients
Ed. Note. This is how top PR firms work while
calling themselves research institutes.
Note below how the Broad Foundation and Michelle Rhee perform parallel services.
The Drum Report. Mother Jones.
Meet the magic PR elves fueling Sally Pipes'
prolific anti-health-care-reform punditry.
Last Tuesday, a week after the Supreme Court's
ruling upholding Obamacare, Sally Pipes appeared before
the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to enumerate the evils of
the law. The president of the Pacific Research Institute, a San
Francisco-based free-market think tank, Pipes warned members of Congress that if they didn't
act quickly Americans would soon suffer the rationed care and long waits
supposedly plaguing her native Canada. The country's health care system, she
insisted, had killed her mother by refusing to test her for colon cancer, which
she later died from.
Pipes' appearance on Capitol Hill, days
before the House voted for the 33rd time to repeal Obamacare, capped a busy two
weeks for the prominent critic of the president's health reform law. In just
the 24 hours following the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision, Pipes churned
out thousands of words of outraged copy, publishing columns in the National
Review Online, the Orange County Register, the Daily Caller, Human Events, and
elsewhere—all while running her small think tank and keeping up her typically
frenetic schedule of media interviews. All of this cemented her status as a
leading voice of Obamacare opposition. Along with a constant stream of op-eds
and TV appearances in recent years, she has also authored three books since
2008 lambasting health care reform.
If Pipes seems supernaturally prolific, there's a
good reason. To assist with her written output, PRI employs a DC-based ghostwriting
and PR firm with drug and health care industry clients. That firm, Keybridge
Communications, researches, drafts, and edits much of Pipes'
published work in an arrangement that's unusual for someone at a supposedly
independent think tank.
Several former PRI staffers tell Mother Jones
it was well known within the organization that Pipes relied heavily on
Keybridge, particularly for her books, and did far from all of her own writing.
(Pipes thanks Keybridge and specific staffers there in her last three books.)
In recent years, PRI has spent large amounts of money on Keybridge's services.
Between 2008 and 2010, the think tank paid Keybridge nearly $1 million—$400,000 alone in 2010.
