I have to say that I was pretty shocked today to listen to the interview today by Terry Gross on the NPR radio interview show "Fresh Air" with Paul Blumenthal, from the open government non-profit, the Sunlite Foundation, about the Obama administration's secret collaboration with the health care industry to try and keep them from lobbying against health care legislation.

While one may not blame Obama for being a bit proactive and trying to engage the health care industry, according to this interview, it went way beyond this. For one thing, the administration enlisted people way to entrenched with the health care industry to negotiate on behalf of the administration. The result of that was the administration caved on probably one of the biggest aspects of what the average people are concerned about in health care, which is the cost of their insurance.

The average citizen is willing to pay a fair price for health insurance, and in most cases, that would be a certain affordable percent of their income. But the insurance companies keep raising premium rates, whether you have a lot of claims or not. In fact, for example, there has been some news recently about heat that Anthem is coming under for arbitrarily raising premium rates across the board in California. But it isn't just California. Anthem just raised Kristi's rates in Illinois pretty significantly, and she hasn't even had a claim.

Cost containment means putting the squeeze on these arbitrary rate increases, especially when the insurance companies are making huge profits. But according to Gross's interview, Obama agreed to back off on "cost controls" which apparently is the lingo for controlling premium increases. But that is the number one issue with the average person - either being able to afford the premiums in the first place, or being priced out of the market all together by out of reach premiums.

And then, if that deal with the devil wasn't enough, Blumenthal says that the health industry trade association agreed to spend a lot of money, I think he said 100 million dollars, on advertising in favor of the legislation. And, if that isn't suspicious enough, according to the interview, the contract to develop the advertising campaign went to a company in which top Obama consultant David Axelrod has a strong interest.

I can't say that I absolutely believe what I heard, especially without hearing the other side. But I think this interview and Blumenthal's book raises questions that Obama has to answer. Already he is alienating his base big time with his overzealous outreach to republicans. This is threatening to undermine his strong majority, and if he can't get anything progressive done with such a majority, then what he might eek out in terms of legislation with a lesser majority or even a minority seems like not much.

Obama, you need to answer to this information, as well as the messages flying around the internet about you and your top aides connections to Exelon and your recent endorsement of nuclear power, or your escalation of the war in Afghanistan. If you completely alienate your base, you will be a one term president. So you need to think about this carefully. If you are going to be the advocate for reinstating open government and reducing the influence of big money and special interests, then you have to do it, not just say it and then do what all the other politicians have done.