Gingrich on Health: Partners with Insulin Company and Healthcare for Kids?

Gingrich Push on Health Care Appears at Odds With G.O.P.

Stephen Chernin/Associated Press

Newt Gingrich at a Tea Party event in April 2009, amid rising conservative anger over health care issues.

By JIM RUTENBERG and MIKE McINTIRE

Published: December 16, 2011

Shortly before the passage of President Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009, Newt Gingrich’s political committee put out a video of Mr. Gingrich denouncing it as a “big politician, big bureaucracy, pork-laden bill.”

Josh Haner/The New York Times

As a candidate, Newt Gingrich, second from front, is criticizing some of the same programs that he supported as a consultant.

“It should be stopped,” he said.
But at the same time, Mr. Gingrich was cheering a $19 billion part of the package that promoted the use of electronic health records, something that benefited clients of his consulting business. “I am delighted that President Obama has picked this as a key part of the stimulus package,” he told health care executives in a January 2009 conference call.
After the bill was passed a month later, Mr. Gingrich’s consultancy, the Center for Health Transformation, joined two of its clients, Allscripts and Microsoft, in an “Electronic Health Records Stimulus Tour” that traveled the country, encouraging doctors and hospitals to buy their products with the billions in new federal subsidies. “Get Engaged, Get Incentives,” one promotion read.
As Mr. Gingrich runs for president, he is working to appeal to Republican primary voters suspicious of big-government activism, especially in the realm of health care. But interviews and a review of records show how active Mr. Gingrich has been in promoting a series of recent programs that have given the government a bigger hand in the delivery of health care, and at the same time benefited his clients.
During the Bush administration, he was a leading Republican advocate for the costly expansion of Medicare, which many in his party now regret. And he and his center pushed some policies that are reflected in Mr. Obama’s health care record — a record Mr. Gingrich regularly criticizes on the campaign trail. All the while, his center functioned as a sort of high-priced club where companies joined him in working the corridors of power in Washington and in state capitals.
Mr. Gingrich did not respond to questions for this article. But a spokeswoman for the center said in an e-mail that Mr. Gingrich was a health care “visionary” who, for instance, supported electronic health records “BEFORE it ever came up for discussion by the president or anyone else.”
Mr. Gingrich’s chief Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has found himself on the defensive among conservatives for signing a universal health care law when he was governor of Massachusetts. But Mr. Gingrich has his own history with health care policy, part of which puts him at odds with many Republican voters.
Mr. Gingrich’s ideas and the interests of his clients are often intertwined. When President George W. Bush and some Congressional Republicans were seeking to block renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2007, Mr. Gingrich met with his former conservative House colleagues, arguing that inaction could unfairly harm children. At the time his center was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by major drug makers and insurers, groups that would have been harmed by a lapse in the program.
When he urged Republicans to support the Bush administration’s expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, he worked to ensure that it would cover new diabetes treatments sold by Novo Nordisk, a Danish drug company and a founding member of Mr. Gingrich’s center.
More broadly, he has indicated his agreement with the most controversial aspect of President Obama’s heath care plan, the requirement that every American buy health insurance. Although he now says he is opposed to the so-called individual mandate, in a May 2009 conference call — previously unreported — he told health care executives, “We believe there should be must-carry; that is, everybody should have health insurance, or if you’re an absolute libertarian, we would allow you to post a bond.”
Mr. Gingrich also worked with former Senator Tom Daschle, an early health policy adviser to Mr. Obama, to write a forward to the center’s book on the expansion of electronic health records. “It’s fair to say he was supportive of the goals of health care reform,” Mr. Daschle wrote in a brief e-mail exchange. “And I felt that we were in agreement on some of the principles.”
Mr. Gingrich has defended his support for the prescription drug benefit, and other health care spending, by saying that present costs will be more than offset by future savings. And a spokeswoman for his company, the Center for Health Transformation, Susan Meyers, reiterated Mr. Gingrich’s assertion that he does not lobby. But his dealings with Novo Nordisk show how his center’s policy advocacy could blend with the narrower objectives of its paying members.
Separate from its $200,000-a-year charter membership in the center, Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest producer of insulin, hired Mr. Gingrich to help “position itself as a thought leader” in an initiative to raise awareness of diabetes. A research document prepared in 2003 by the Gingrich Group, a consulting firm related to the health care center, noted that in improving treatment, the company wished to also emphasize insulin-delivery devices that “offer better financial return for Novo.”