pharmaceutical industry. Not only does he get big campaign contributions from them but has had an affair with a health industry lobbyist.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/13/dreyfuss-r.htmlWhen Eli Lilly, the $10-billion pharmaceutical giant, was deciding last year where to invest its campaign contributions most profitably, an obvious choice was Representative Bill Thomas, the California Republican who currently chairs the House Ways and Means Committee and who is far and away the most important member of Congress on legislation related to health care, Medicare, and prescription drugs. The company funneled $13,000 to his campaign war chest, making it the number-one contributor among Thomas's long list of corporate backers.
Then, last March, seeking to add clout to its sharp-elbowed team of lobbyists, the Indianapolis firm hired Deborah Steelman, the capital's best-connected health care lobbyist, to oversee its government relations work as vice president for corporate affairs. Steelman, who was George W. Bush's adviser on health care during the 2000 election campaign, previously had served as president of Steelman Health Strategies, her Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, and as a White House budget official under Bush's father. Mentioned as a possible candidate for secretary of Health and Human Services under the current President Bush, Steelman had represented a blue-chip roster of drugmakers and HMOs. In the late 1990s, she served with Thomas on a commission that laid out a radical and ambitious scheme to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a system of vouchers.
In hiring Steelman, Eli Lilly--which over the past two years has played a leading role in the pharmaceutical industry's $250-million lobbying, advertising, public relations, and campaign-cash blitzkrieg against a proposed Medicare drug benefit--displayed a remarkable amount of both chutzpah and political savvy. Just a year earlier, following a six-month investigation, The Bakersfield Californian had reported that the congressman and the lobbyist, then both married to others, were entangled in an intimate, "intensely personal" relationship with illicit romantic overtones. Because Thomas was at that very moment engaged in writing a bill on Medicare and a proposed prescription-drug benefit--a bill in which several of Steelman's clients had an enormous stake--and because he was in the midst of a battle among Republicans to take over leadership of the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the Thomas-Steelman link raised eyebrows, if only briefly. When the Californian story broke, Democratic Representative Pete Stark of California noted that Thomas's Medicare drug bill was strongly backed by drugmakers and suggested that an investigation might be warranted. "There is definitely a perception of impropriety there, of a quid pro quo, since the bill was written to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies she represents," Stark told Roll Call. more...
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