NYT:

The largely hidden role of the for-profit health insurers highlights the increasingly confusing world of campaign finance, as nonprofit groups like the National Federation of Independent Business and its Voice of Free Enterprise program can keep their donor lists secret, and then present their carefully crafted message, financed in large part by big business, as if it is coming from, perhaps, a more sympathetic voice….The Arkansas television advertisement, run in December, featured John Parke, the chief operating office of Democrat Printing and Lithographing Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, a 143-year-old, family-run company.

“We are a small business that has been part of the central Arkansas community for four generations,” Mr. Parke says in the ad, paid for by Voice of Free Enterprise, which features scenes of worn-out printing presses and laborers hard at work. “What Obamacare means for Arkansas small businesses is tough choices, the mandates, the increased costs, the increased taxes.”

But tax records filed late last year by the group show $1.593 million of the organization’s $4.9 million in revenue came from an anonymous donor in 2012, the largest single contribution.

That is the exact amount that America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade association run by top executives from companies including Aetna and United Health Care, lists as having spent on “advocacy organizations as part of its advocacy efforts on issues associated with reform of the nation’s health care system.” The tax return prepared separately by America’s Health Insurance Plans does not disclose that it donated the money to, or at least spent it in collaboration with, the Voice of Free Enterprise.