A: Bonnie and Clyde – outlaws and lovers on a killing spree?

B: Thelma & Louise – road trip BFFs, chick power on steroids?

C: Leopold and Loeb– two murderously curious teens?

D: Whitaker and Baxter – A husband-and-wife political consultancy team?

Answers:

A. Incorrect. Bonnie & Clyde certainly captured America’s imagination for a time, but they are long gone, as is their impact.

B. Incorrect. Thelma & Louise killed one creepy guy, blew up a truck and went out in a blaze of feminist glory. But their story was just made-up, a movie that mainly impacted MGM’s bottom line.

C. Incorrect. Leopold and Loeb were two teens who murdered a child out of curiosity. What they did was horrible beyond words but most people today haven’t even heard of them.

D. Correct! Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were a California husband-wife team who, in 1933, started a company called Campaigns, Inc., the world’s first political consulting firm. And as you surely know, nothing has distorted the workings of American democracy in the last century as much as political consulting.

Oh, no said the California Medical Association

Thanks in large part to Whitaker and Baxter, the United States has the most expensive and least effective health care system in the industrialized world. Their ingenious framing of the issues continues to strangle all progress in health care reform. Yes, Whitaker and Baxter left a lasting legacy –a truly sick ‘politics of health care.’

It all began in 1942 with Earl Warren, a Republican who ran for governor of California. His political aides insisted he hire Whitaker and Baxter for his campaign. He did and he won.

Then, after suffering a serious kidney infection, Warren got an outrageous medical bill. It enraged him so that, in 1945, he announced plans to create a health insurance system for all Californians.

Oh, no said the California Medical Association, who hired Whitaker and Baxter, Warren’s old campaign consultants, to attack his ideas. They launched a campaign focused on building resistance to the payroll tax that Warren proposed to fund his system. Sound familiar?

It should. This same strategy – stoking fears of higher payroll taxes – was used to kill a single-payer bill in Vermont just a few years ago.

How to kill a national health insurance plan

Key to the success of these anti-tax arguments is the intentional omission of a critical fact: payroll-funded health care means no premiums, no deductibles, no coinsurance, no co-pays. With payroll funding, everybody – waiter, landscaper, investment broker, airline steward – pays their fair share based on how much they earn.

Warren’s bill went down to defeat. But Campaigns, Inc. lived on to screw up healthcare reform some more, this time on the national level.

In 1945, President Truman started work on a national health insurance plan. The American Medical Association, determined to keep public opinion hostile to any health care fix, hired – guess who? – Whitaker and Baxter. After all, they did such a great job mucking things up in California.

True to form, Whitaker and Baxter began a disinformation campaign creating buzzwords that have been used over and over to defeat healthcare reform: “socialism” and “government takeover of medicine.”

These same buzzwords were used against Hillarycare, Hillary Clinton’s healthcare reform proposal, in the early 1990s. They were used to shape the debate around Obamacare just a few years ago. And they are being used today to defeat ColoradoCare, an initiative on the November 2016 ballot that would create a statewide, integrated healthcare system in Colorado.

Corporate Disinformation

Whitaker and Baxter were real geniuses when it came to manipulating the American people into opposing the kind of worry-free health care that people in, say, Australia, Canada and France (and many other countries) enjoy.

And what has the great success of Whitaker and Baxter brought us?

• An ultra-politicized healthcare reform process controlled not by patients and doctors, but by health insurance industry lobbyists and the politicians they own. Check out the Affordable Care Act for details!
• Over 30 million Americans have no health insurance, and 30 million more who are underinsured. That is, they have insurance but still can’t afford care because their out-of-pocket costs are too high.

A public health disaster born of this fractured and disintegrated “non-system” including a growing mortality gap between rich and poor, an opioid epidemic, and a tsunami of diabetes.

How much are “killer” business models costing us?

The cost of this, in lives and money, is beyond calculation. Health care commands resources we should be spending on our infrastructure: bridges, highways, schools, parks, veterans’ care, community programs. The list is endless of what we’re missing out on so that a few people can make a lot of money.

Our healthcare system bankrupts hundreds of thousands of us each year, most of whom are insured. And the costs keep rising! Some economists even predict that the next financial collapse could be brought on by our unaffordable, “bubble-like” healthcare system.

So the next time you see a well-produced commercial featuring an American health insurance company warmly touting their earnest and vital contribution to the health and well-being of your community, remember this: You are being played.

Just like oil companies and cigarette manufacturers, corporations in the business of health care benefit from harming you. To make money, oil companies damage our Earth without compensating the rest of us for the harm they’ve caused. To make money, tobacco companies sell an addictive product that kills people. To make money, the health insurance industry delays and/or outright denies our access to care, while at the same time driving costs ever higher.

These are all killer business models that depend on making sure you aren’t getting the facts.

And that’s why HEAL California is all about giving you the information you need to see through the buzzwords and fancy commercials. Because when we get legislation to establish California-style Medicare for All, you can bet Anthem, Humana, Kaiser, Blue Shield and all the rest will trot out their expensive Whitaker Baxter-style PR campaigns to confuse and fool us once again.

But like Abraham Lincoln said, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Yes, information is power! Join us and together, we will win!

Learn more about Campaigns, Inc.

Want to know more about Campaigns, Inc.? Check out the exhibit at the California State Archives: Campaigns, Inc., Government by Whitaker and Baxter. It’s running through October 31, 2016 and it’s completely free!