Why did Hillary duck commenting on Verizon and GE last night?
Bernie has had recent public wars of words with the CEOs of both Verizon and GE, 2 companies that he has called examples of corporate greed in talking about them making billions while paying little or no federal income taxes, their treatment of U.S. employees (moving jobs overseas in the case of both, plus Verizon trying squeeze employee health care benefits and prompting the current strike) and obscene compensation to their CEOs. Bernie has made critical comments about both companies on several occasions. In the last week, Jeff Immelt of GE wrote a negative Op-Ed about Bernie in the Washington Post and Lowell McAdam of Verizon called Bernie's views "comtemptible".
Wolf Blitzer asked Bernie a question about whether he could promote the interests of large U.S. companies abroad (I didn't realize that was the job of a President) when he was so critical of businesses like GE and Verizon and basically asked him to backpedal. Bernie stood his ground and defended his comments about both companies.
Hillary was not asked the question but had an opportunity to address the issue in rebuttal. She could have gone in either direction. She could have joined Bernie in criticizing these 2 large companies that are notorious tax dodgers. Or, as I thought she would do, she could have called Bernie anti-business and talked about how she promoted the interests of large U.S. corporations when she was Secretary of State. But supporting the CEO of Verizon might not have gone over too well with the striking Verizon union workers whose picket line she had just visited in New York the previous day. So she took a pass on the issue and said nothing.
A little research showed a couple of linkages between Hillary and both Verizon and GE. Each company paid her $225,000 to give a speech in 2013. And it turns out that Verizon and GE, along with Tenet Healthcare, formed a partnership with the Clinton Foundation in 2012 to launch the "Clinton Health Matters Initiative". Tenet is a hospital management with an incredibly sleazy history. GE Healthcare is a major company under the GE umbrella. It makes all kinds of expensive medical equipment and medical consumables and has a healthcare IT operation. Verizon also has a health IT practice.
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/13/hillary_clinton_rakes_in_verizon_cash_while_bernie_sanders_supports_companys_striking_workers/
<In 2012, the Clinton Foundation announced the launch of the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, in partnership with Verizon — along with GE and the Tenet Healthcare Corporation.
“We are proud to partner with the Clinton Foundation on this innovative and potentially life-changing initiative,” declared Peter Tippett, chief medical officer and vice president of Verizon’s health IT practice.
“As the Foundation’s technology provider, we believe we can empower individuals to take better care of their health. We have barely scratched the surface on using technology to improve health and well-being and reduce medical costs,” the Verizon executive wrote.
The corporation’s rhetoric reflects the individualistic, neoliberal economic ideology that the Clintons have endorsed for decades.
“Our work with the Clinton Foundation is just one more example of how we are bringing our vision to life,” the Verizon vice president said in 2012.>
The third corporate partner in the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, Tenet Healthcare, is virtually by consensus one of the sleaziest companies in modern American business history. Here is a link to a story that covers some of its outrages over the years for which it has paid over a billion dollars in fines, including Medicare fraud, showering financial rewards on doctors who were performing unnecessary heart surgeries in its hospitals, imprisoning 23 patients within a mental health care facility and investor fraud. In 2007, Tenet hired Jeb Bush as a special Board member to help it address ethical issues.
http://www.journalinquirer.com/page_one/a-billion-dollars-paid/article_0a23e19a-4bad-11e3-a118-0019bb2963f4.html
<Tenet that August agreed to pay $54 million to resolve the allegations that between 1997 and 2002 doctors at a Redding, Calif., hospital had billed Medicare for unnecessary tests and treatments. The FBI had raided the hospital, and Tenet didn’t admit wrongdoing but agreed to a compliance program.
In his 2007 book about the Redding scandal, “Coronary, A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry,” Klaidman suggested that Tenet “was bottom line like most corporations — the message was delivered from corporate to the hospitals.” There was an “inordinate volume of cardiac procedures” at Redding, he said, “most of which would generate excessive and undeserved outlier income.” He also wrote that people like the two doctors at the center of the controversy “generated very high and escalating revenues and became golden boys.”
Klaidman further reported that when the FBI raided the hospital, Tenet was “facing 26 lawsuits relating to the corrupt business practices and unsanitary conditions at seven of its hospitals in various states” and that between 1994 and 2003 Tenet was “the subject of 53 federal investigations.”>
<Tenet in June then made its biggest settlement with the government, agreeing to pay more than $900 million over the next four years for “alleged unlawful billing practices” in the 1990s. The Justice Department said that in exchange for a release from liability, Tenet would pay:
• More than $788 million to resolve claims that it collected excessive “outlier” payments, higher-than-usual Medicare reimbursements for expensive procedures.
• More than $47 million to resolve claims that it paid kickbacks to physicians to get Medicare patients referred to its facilities and that Tenet billed Medicare for the services ordered or referred by physicians who had a financial relationship with the company.
• More than $46 million to resolve claims that the company engaged in “upcoding,” using diagnosis codes it was unable to support or were otherwise improper to get higher Medicare reimbursements.>
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