Private Health Insurance Spends Big on Political Contributions and Lobbying

With the election looming and the beginning of annual open enrollment periods for health insurance plans, it is vital to pull back the curtain on the influx of money from Big Insurance corporations to political campaigns and lobbying. 

Data available from OpenSecrets.com thus far in 2024 shows that 93% of Congressional incumbents running in 2024 received contributions from Big Insurance, including 100% of Senate incumbents. These insurance corporations run the ten largest Medicare Advantage plans in the country and are known to deny needed health care and defraud the government, but face little to no consequences.

Insurance corporations included in this analysis are UnitedHealth Group, Humana, CVS/Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Elevance Health, Centene Corp, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (which represents many MA plans, including two of the largest: BCBSMichigan and Highmark), and SCAN.

Additionally, as bipartisan scrutiny of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and Medicare Advantage plans has intensified, spending by Big Insurance on lobbying has increased.

Total lobbying spending by America’s Health Insurance Plans; Pharmaceutical Care Management Association; UnitedHealth; CVS/Aetna; and Cigna for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023.

This open enrollment season, people struggling to choose a health insurance plan that they can afford and that provides the care they need may ask themselves, “Why is our health care system like this?” The immense amounts of money Big Insurance spends to blanket members of Congress with contributions and lobbying hold the answer. 

Additional analysis following the election will allow evaluation of just how much Big Insurance spends on politics to help protect industry profits and will give health reform advocates an idea of how to overcome this influence to pass policies for patients, not profits.