In his prime, consultant David Blaszczak bragged that he made millions for his hedge-fund clients when he predicted important Medicare funding changes.
“Warren Buffett can eat it,” Blaszczak wrote in one email in 2013, referencing the legendary stock trader.
He boasted in that same year to a finance executive: “I am a beast that cannot be stopped.”
The case targets the narrow but lucrative world of “political intelligence,” a web of consulting firms like one that Blaszczak co-founded in 2014. Such firms traffic in crumbs of information coaxed out of federal employees, or simply good hunches, and make money by landing contracts with Wall Street firms.
Political intelligence workers track countless decisions Medicare and the Food and Drug Administration make each month about which hospital beds, heart valves, surgical techniques or drugs will rise or fall in value — or if the government will pay for them at all.
It’s a Washington, D.C., industry that reflects the big business of U.S. health care. While patients who get radiation treatments for cancer or dialysis after kidney failure are largely unaware, small tweaks in what the government pays for these services can mean millions to hedge funds and their elite investors.