The White House official who exchanged confidential taxpayer
information with the IRS is a longtime Obama advisor and progressive
activist who is currently the most powerful official on Obamacare
implementation within the White House.
Jeanne Lambrew, deputy assistant to the president for health policy, entered Obama-world in 2008 as a health-policy adviser to then-Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. She was subsequently named deputy director and then director
of the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) now-defunct
Office of Health Reform, where she reported directly to Kathleen
Sebelius.
Lambrew’s current “deputy assistant to the president” position, while
modest-sounding, gives her extensive and centralized power over the
White House’s efforts to implement Obamacare.
“[Lambrew] is also unabashedly liberal – often serving as the
architect of her party’s most progressive ideas on healthcare
reform,” wrote American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Scott
Gottlieb in a March op-ed.
“The few remaining centrists thinkers inside the White House, mostly
scattered across the National Economic Council and Treasury, are gone –
or largely marginalized when it comes to issues around implementation.
The people drafting and reviewing the regulations are mostly centered in
the White House and its Domestic Policy Council — and they mostly work
for Jeanne Lambrew,” Gottlieb wrote.
“Normally, the Office of Management and Budget and the National
Economic Council would be heavily engaged on the issuance of regulations
tied to a major law like Obamacare. Not the Obama White House. The
economists still play on the fiscal issues related to Medicare and
Medicaid. But when it comes to Obamacare implementation, they are not
calling the shots. The power is centered on Lambrew,” Gottlieb wrote.
Lambrew exchanged confidential
taxpayer information on organizations with IRS official Sarah Hall
Ingram and White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz, according to 2012 emails obtained
by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to
The Daily Caller last week. Ingram attempted to counsel Lambrew and the
White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing
Obamacare’s contraception mandate.
Lambrew also hosted 155
of Ingram’s 165 White House visits, according to White House visitor
logs that were recently taken offline during the government shutdown.
The IRS improperly targeted conservative groups for harassment of their
tax-exempt applications and abusive audits between 2010 and 2012.
Lambrew previously served as a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress, a left-wing Washington think tank headed by former
Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.
Podesta credited Lambrew with helping to shape the “foundation”
of the progressive health care reform push beginning in 2005, which was
eventually realized under Obama despite attempts to “demagogue” the
issue by conservatives who believe that “health is a privilege, not a
right,” according to Podesta.
Lambrew moderated a June 2008 Center for American Progress panel criticizing Obama opponent John McCain’s health policy.
Among numerous other positions in government and academia, Lambrew
worked on health care reform at the Department of Health and Human
Services between 1993-94, as First Lady Hillary Clinton led the
administration’s disastrous health care reform initiative.
Lambrew has contributed money to the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Obama, and to the now defunct George Soros-funded PAC America Coming Together.
“Providing and improving health care for every American may be the current test of our country’s strength of conviction, as was enacting civil rights for all in the 1960s and the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s,” wrote Lambrew, Podesta, and Teresa L. Shaw in 2005.
The White House did not return a request for comment.
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