Obama's Private Health Care Meetings Draw Comparisons To Cheney

By The Huffington Post News Team, Huffington Post

One of the country's leading good government groups declared on Wednesday that Barack Obama's refusal to release the names of health care executives with whom he has consulted mirrored the type of secrecy seen under Dick Cheney.

In a brief interview with the Huffington Post, Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said there were obvious and troubling parallels between the Obama White House health care meetings and the much-maligned, closed-door energy policy task force led by the former vice president.

"People wanted to know who Cheney had met with in formulating the Bush administration's energy policy and we want to know who the Obama administration met with in formulating their energy and now their health care policy," said Weisman. "It is all the more critical considering the debate going on right now and the push to get health care done quickly. I don't know if you can actually distinguish the two [Cheney's energy task force and Obama's health care meetings]."

The remarks reflect an emerging frustration among government watchdogs that the Obama White House has failed to achieve the transparent governance that the president promised on the campaign trail. This past week the special inspector general for the TARP testified that the Treasury Department had refused to adopt even the most rudimentary reforms to help track the spending of taxpayer funds.

On Wednesday afternoon, CREW filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security over the Secret Service's refusal to provide records pertaining to the visits of 18 private health care industry executives to the White House.

"We want to see and the public wants to see what influences that may have been brought to bear on the president and his administration in formulating health care policy," said Weismann. "It would be interesting and in the public's interest to know if they were regularly meeting with a health care industry official."

Both the White House and the Secret Service have held that these records are exempt from public disclosure laws because they regard presidential communications. Moreover, they have insisted that the administration is still in the process of setting disclosure policy, suggesting that they could end up reversing course in the decision to keep these records private.

"We are reviewing our policy on access to visitor logs and related litigation," White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, told the Los Angeles Times.

In the interim, however, the White House is taking a political hit. As pointed out by Josh Orton at the site MyDD, Obama's campaign website still lists his pledge to do away with excessive government secrecy.

Moreover, the president, at multiple moments during the campaign, used Cheney's secret task force meetings as a prime example of how cryptic policy-making was not just bad for the environment but was a poor reflection of American values.

Here are few quotes then-Senator Barack Obama made in regards to Cheney:

Obama Statement on Vice President Cheney, Chicago, I.L., June 25, 2007: "Throughout this administration, Vice President Cheney has consistently sought to operate in secrecy and thwart rules designed to ensure the public's right to know how their business is being done. I believe strongly that democracy works best when it does its work in the daylight."

Obama Ethics Proposal: "Oil and gas executives met with Vice President Cheney to write our energy laws, with the goal of increasing their profits and saddling the public with their environmental and public health costs; Cheney went to the Supreme Court to keep the names of these lobbyists secret."

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Taking Our Government Back, Manchester, N.H., June 22, 2007: "The oil companies were allowed to craft energy policy with Dick Cheney in secret while every other voice was silenced - including the NASA scientists who tried to warn us about the dangers of climate change. The industry got everything it wanted,"

The White House would not respond to a request for comment.

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