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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsShareholders complain: Aetna Insurance Donated to Anti-Obamacare Campaigns in 2010
A group of Aetna shareholders is challenging the health insurer for donating to the American Action Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce two organizations dedicated to undermining Obamacare.
Aetna donated over $7 million to the two groups during the Democrats effort to enact health care reform, though the contributions did not become public until this year, when the company accidentally made the disclosure in a year-end regulatory filing with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
In a latter to Aetna on Monday, the shareholders claim that the company did not comply with disclosure policies or inform its investors about the donations:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/07/14/517291/aetna-shareholders-dismayed-over-insurers-donations-to-anti-obamacare-campaigns/
Something in ACA must have scared Aetna executives. They not only donated to the anti-ACA campaign during congressional debate on it, but broke commitments it had previously made regarding disclosure of its lobbying expenditures. Interesting.
ProgressiveEconomist
(5,818 posts)on the agenda for publicly-traded companies. IMO if Sarbanes-Oxley can regulate corporate financial disclosure, then similar laws should govern millions of dollars in corporate bribes to support political candidates.
Not only would such laws give more power to shareholders to block "donations" to candidates and SuperPACs, but they'd also make clearer the quid-pro-quo nature of such corporate cash. In his Citizens' United dissent, Justice Stevens argued that the only reason corporations even exist, let alone make political "donations", is crass profit.