Healthcare Lobbyists Seek To Repair Relationship With Republicans

House Republicans say healthcare groups that backed the Democrats’ overhaul bill are trying to rekindle their hot-and-cold-relationship with the GOP.

The health industry’s effort to make nice with Republicans is both reflective of how Washington works and how much the political winds have shifted since Barack Obama’s inauguration early last year.

House Republicans felt shunned by their allies in the medical sector in 2009 as Democrats basked in their electoral victories that gave them control of Congress and the White House since 1994.

Nearly two years after Obama’s triumph and six months after the passage of health reform, the mood in the nation’s capital and beyond has changed dramatically.

"We had to find people to have meetings with us" in 2009, Ways and Means Committee Republican Kevin Brady (Texas) recently said with a smile. But that started to change soon after the health bill passed.

Whether Republicans are ready to forgive and forget if they take over the House is still an open question.

Some of the groups Republicans are meeting with, Brady acknowledged, endorsed the healthcare legislation, which barely passed Congress.

"They did [support the bill] and that's frustrating," Brady said, adding that the bottom line for Republicans is coming up with a better healthcare package than the bill that Obama signed into law.

Republicans say what’s grating isn’t just the fact that traditional allies backed Democrats, but that their support helped push the bill over the finish line.

Republican efforts to repeal health reform will undoubtedly cause awkward moments for trade groups that endorsed the law.

"Whether they support repeal or not," Barton warned, "that debate's coming."

Much of the renewed attention paid to Republican lawmakers has to do with "parochial" issues such as regulations on insurance companies.

“There is a legitimate question to be asked as to how well they’ll be received,” the Republican staffer said. “When you come to plead your case about an individual provision you didn’t like to Republicans, they’ll turn around and say: ‘But you’re the one who helped put it into law.’”
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