Today’s Managing Health Care Cost Indicator is $119,267,285
Click to enlarge. Source
Good article in the Washington Post yesterday about how the debt ceiling bill will pit the health industry lobby against the defense industry lobby. Both are highly invested in a Congressional settlement to avoid mandatory cuts, which could be devastating for each industry. The number above is the spending so far this year for pharma industry lobbying. There’s also an intriguing article in Bloomberg Business Week analyzing the debt ceiling imbroglio from a game theory perspective. It asserts that the outcome was inevitable given each party’s position. The author considered the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Tea Party separately.
The grid above shows lobbying expenses by industry for early 2011. It’s from the Center for Responsive Politics, which does a great job of displaying this information in a timely and accessible fashion. You can drill down at their site to see lobbying expense by industry segment and by company.
I’ll be off blogging for the weekend – cycling my fourteenth Pan Mass Challenge from Sturbridge to Provincetown, Massachusetts
