ADVERTISEMENT

Stephanopoulos Fails to Disclose That Health Care Expert Previously Donated to Democrats

May 7, 2017

ABC News host George Stephanopoulos failed to mention during his Sunday show "This Week" that his guest, Dr. Atul Gawande, is a Democratic donor who has given over $2,000 to Democrats.

Stephanopoulos introduced Gawande as one of "America's premier health professionals" and brought him on the show to discuss the American Health Care Act, House Republicans' plan to replace Obamacare.

Gawande spoke critically of the Republican health care bill and said that it would make health care worse for Americans.

"This is a bill that makes each measure of health and health care worse, rather than better than under Obamacare," he said. "It's not a proposal that anybody would put forward as a credible or sane proposal for solving the problems in Obamacare."

While Stephanopoulos mentioned that Gawande was a surgeon at a women's hospital in Boston who taught at Harvard University, was a staff writer at the New Yorker, and had authored four New York Times bestselling books, he never mentioned that Gawande was a Democratic donor.

Gawande donated more than $2,000 to Democratic candidates over the years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Beyond donating to Democrats, Gawande previously worked on multiple Democratic campaigns and served in the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, according to a Guernica magazine profile piece on Gawande.

But before Gawande became a doctor and began to write about the power and limits of medicine, he worked in American politics. He joined Al Gore's presidential campaign in 1988 and Bill Clinton's in 1992, going on to become a senior health policy adviser in the latter's administration. As the New York Times described, Gawande "became a key figure in ... one of the most potent domestic issues propelling Mr. Clinton to the presidency: health care reform." Though Clinton's proposal was defeated, "That collective effort," Gawande argues, "laid the groundwork for what would pass about 20 years later."

This is not the first time that Stephanopoulos has failed to disclose political donations. He never disclosed his own personal donations to the Clinton Foundation during multiple interviews with Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 campaign, the Washington Free Beacon reported.