As Congress prepared to allocate trillions of dollars in COVID-19 pandemic relief, lobbying expenditures in the health care industry increased at 10 times the rate of any other sector, according to a paper co-authored by two Brigham Young University professors.
The paper, published Wednesday in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, stated that the health sector spent over $248 million on lobbying and filed 357 new lobbying registrations during the first fiscal quarter of 2020, “representing 22.7% of all lobbying and 22.6% of all new lobbying registrations, the highest totals and percentages among the nine consecutive quarters.”
“The health sector lobbying spending increased 10.1% in Q1 2020 while non-health sector increased only 1.2%,” wrote the authors, who include BYU accounting professor John Barrick and BYU School of Accountancy Associate Director Bill Tayler, as well as researchers from Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cincinnati.
Looking at lobbying and registration reports for the first fiscal quarter, which went from Jan. 1 to March 31, the researchers found that the top 30 health care organizations spent $99.5 million on lobbying in the first quarter and, on average, these companies spent 55% more on lobbying than they did the previous quarter.
Just over half of these companies were in the pharmaceutical industry, including Biogen Inc., a Massachusetts biotechnology company that increased lobbying spending 344% between the two quarters. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents pharmaceutical companies, increased its lobbying spending from $8.8 million in Q4 2019 to $11.51 million, making it the largest spender on lobbying in the health sector.
“These results illustrated the health sector’s increased efforts — in both absolute and relative terms (as compared with non-health sectors) — to influence Congress’ appropriation of COVID-19 relief,” the authors wrote.
Even though the paper doesn’t look at how the $3 trillion in federal coronavirus relief funding that’s been approved to date has been allocated, Tayler said it provides a glimpse into “how the sausage is made” and the amount of money spent to influence policy decisions.
“While we can’t tie the dollar amount of the distribution and say, ‘Hey, they got a disproportionate share,’ we can say they wouldn’t be trying so hard to be heard if there wasn’t a high expected return on that investment,” Tayler said in an interview Thursday. “So all we can see with this paper is who is spending money to be in front of the people who are handing out money.”
“If it didn’t influence the way money was spent, the lobbyists wouldn’t be spending so much time and money to do it,” added Tayler.
Tayler pointed out that federal COVID-19 funding is intended for a number of non-health-care-related expenditures, including unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, small business assistance and funding for federal agencies.
“It’s maybe not a huge surprise to people (that health care lobbying spending increased during a pandemic), but I think it’s interesting to point out that, when Congress is giving out a lot of money, the lobbyists are very active,” he said. “They all want to be heard, they all want to get their piece of the pie. Because it’s a zero-sum game. If one group gets more money, that means another group gets less money, typically.”
Barrick noted that second-quarter data for April 1 to June 30 is not yet available and that lobbying spending in the health care industry will likely continue to increase as federal lawmakers consider other COVID-19 relief measures.
“So we know the lobbyists aren’t done on this topic,” Barrick said. “If anything, delaying (relief measures) just increases the feeding frenzy.”
Connor Richards covers government, the environment and south Utah County for the Daily Herald. He can be reached at [email protected] and 801-344-2599.
