AP: Key Health Care Senators Have Industry Ties

I meant to post the story on Friday but I wasn’t able to get to it so figured I’d lead off with today… The Associated Press reported last week on the ties between several key Senators and the health care industry. Among them Connecticut’s own Chris Dodd.

Sen. Dodd’s wife Jackie Clegg Dodd sits on the boards of four pharmaceutical companies, Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals.

Mrs. Dodd last year was one of the most highly compensated non-employee members of the Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc. board, on which she has served since 2004. She earned $32,000 in fees and $109,587 in stock option awards last year, according to the company’s SEC filings.

Mrs. Dodd earned $79,063 in fees from Cardiome in its last fiscal year, while Brookdale Senior Living gave her $122,231 in stock awards in 2008, their SEC filings show. She earned no income from her post as a director for Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals but holds up to $15,000 in stock in Pear Tree, which describes itself as a development-stage pharmaceutical company focused on the needs of aging women.

The annual financial disclosure reports for members of Congress are less precise. They only require that assets and liabilities be listed in ranges of values.

Dodd sought a 90-day extension to file his report covering last year, giving him until mid-August to submit his report, but released his report Friday to The Associated Press.

Bryan DeAngelis, Dodd’s spokesman, said, “Jackie Clegg Dodd’s career is her own; absolutely independent of Senator Dodd, as it was when they married 10 years ago. The senator has worked to reform our health care system for decades, and nothing about his wife’s career is relevant at all to his leadership of that effort.”

DeAngelis said that Mrs. Dodd has hired a personal ethics lawyer to avoid any conflicts of interest and is not a lobbyist.

In addition to Sen Dodd. Democrats Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin and Republicans Tom Coburn, Judd Gregg, John Kyl and Orrin Hatchn are mentioned in the AP story.

I’m not going not to draw any conclusions, my advice is to read the entire article and draw your own conclusions… I have fundamental problem with Sen Dodd, or any Senator for that matter,  authoring legislation that may directly effect companies on whose boards their spouse sits.

The the bigger story within the story may be the APs passing mention of Sen. Dodd’s magically appreciating Irish Cottage… Michelle Malkin has the deatails on that here.

Chris Dodd’s Wife Paid by AIG Subsidiary???

Chris Dodd had an Op Ed in “Dodd: Setting the record straight” in this morning’s News Times… Unfortunately, the piece doesn’t seem to be on their web site so I can’t link to it… Regardless the timing couldn’t have been worse since Sen. Dodd is likely to face new questions about his wife’s involvement with IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG:

No wonder Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) went wobbly last week when asked about his February amendment ratifying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives at insurance giant AIG. Dodd has been one of the company’s favorite recipients of campaign contributions. But it turns out that Senator Dodd’s wife has also benefited from past connections to AIG as well.

From 2001-2004, Jackie Clegg Dodd served as an “outside” director of IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG. IPC, which provides property casualty catastrophe insurance coverage, was formed in 1993 and currently has a market cap of $1.4 billion and trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol IPCR. In 2001, in addition to a public offering of 15 million shares of stock that raised $380 million, IPC raised more than $109 million through a simultaneous private placement sale of 5.6 million shares of stock to AIG – giving AIG a 20% stake in IPC. (AIG sold its 13.397 million shares in IPC in August, 2006.)

To quote Ricky Ricardo “Somebody’s got some splainin’ to do.”

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