White House’s Deal With Big Pharma

[Bread and Circus]

http://wallstreetpit.com/9303-the-deal-between-big-pharma-and-the-white-house

By Robert Reich|Aug 9, 2009, 5:30 PM|Author's Website

I’m a strong supporter of universal health insurance, and a fan of the Obama administration. But I’m appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm to buy their support.

Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That’s basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it’s proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the Boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included. (We don’t know how far the deal extends beyond Medicare because its details haven’t been made public.)

Let me remind you: Any bonanza for the drug industry means higher health-care costs for the rest of us, which is one reason why critics of the emerging healthcare plans, including the Congressional Budget Office, are so worried about their failure to adequately stem future healthcare costs.

........

I don’t want to be puritanical about all this. Politics is a rough game in which means and ends often get mixed and melded. Perhaps the White House deal with Big Pharma is a necessary step to get anything resembling universal health insurance. But if that’s the case, our democracy is in terrible shape. How soon until big industries and their Washington lobbyists have become so politically powerful that secret WhiteHouse-industry deals like this are prerequisites to any important legislation? When will it become standard practice that such deals come with hundreds of millions of dollars of industry-sponsored TV advertising designed to persuade the public that the legislation is in the public’s interest? (Any Democrats and progressives who might be reading this should ask themselves how they’ll feel when a Republican White House cuts such deals to advance its own legislative priorities.)

We’re on a precarious road — and wherever it leads, it’s not toward democracy.

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Very sad indeed.

Obama has went off the reservation on this one :(

[jaxx]

1. This was debunked last night several times as not going to happen.

Look up sometime around 9pm.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. If you know it was debunked, can you link to it?

Or at least point out where one would look for "around 9 pm last night"?

[Bread and Circus]

3. Robert Reich's opinion was debunked? I don't get it.

[TheWraith]

4. The claim that there was a deal was debunked. There is no deal.

Apparently some of the lower level White House people overstepped their authority and got called on it.

[Bread and Circus]

6. I've heard the back and forth on this.....there seems to be something that was discussed

perhaps the WH is in damage control mode?

[SIMPLYB1980]

5. Bla Bla Bla...