There's interesting blog post by Matt Taibbi if you haven't seen it.
PhRMA’s Big Bribe Comes In
I've excerpted some highlights below, but read the full article if you have time.
We’re apparently finally seeing delivery of the Big Bribe that President Obama and Rahm Emanuel extracted from that pharmaceutical industry in exchange for dropping drug-pricing reform in the health care bill.
The paradox, of course, is that the same corporate executives pushing to suppress Medicare from negotiating drug prices, are the same ones who will defend to the death the mantra "Let the market work" -- well when it comes to their ability to jack up prices anyway.
The deal was consumated in July with the usual corporate suspects.
To recap: PhRMA, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, earlier this year announced that it would be setting aside $150 million to pay for an ad campaign supporting the President’s health care bill. The deal was apparently struck in July, after former Louisiana congressman and current PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin (Rod Blagojevich’s underdog opponent in the upcoming semifinal match of the Corrupt Scumbag of the Century So Far tournament) met with Rahm and other Obama aides in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Also in attendance were representatives of the usual panoply of awful medical corporations, including Abbott laboratories, Merck, and Pfizer.
It was in this meeting that the White House agreed to sell out health care reform in exchange for a few bucks to fund the next couple of election cycles.
But to the chagrin of the White House, Waxman apparently didn't get the 'memo'.
The only problem with this plan, from the White House’s side, was that not all of the president’s fellow Democrats played along. Specifically, Energy and Commerce chair Henry Waxman put a provision in his health care bill that allowed the government to negotiate lower rates. If Waxman’s language were to be allowed to survive, it would queer the White House’s deal.
Now to deal with Waxman's faux pas (of acting in good faith for the American people), a secret memo has circulated signed by 60 Representatives.
Now we’re also seeing pressure from a group of freshmen and Blue Dogs, who have composed a letter to a quartet of House Committee chairs requesting that the Waxman language be removed from the health care bill and replaced with the PhRMA language, which happens to be the language the White House is pushing and which will appear in the Baucus bill in the Senate. The pro-PhRMA language retains the preposterous government subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry in the form of laws banning Medicare from negotiating market rates. It is completely useless and of no possible social benefit to anyone except pharmaceutical companies, but this group still managed to get 60 people to sign this letter.
As we know, whores work best in the dark. Taibbi has a short excerpt of the letter in the article. Full letter posted here(PDF). (thanks to Generation 1960 for the link )
Interestingly, the congressmen who wrote the bill — former NFL bust Heath Shuler and Illinois Democrat Debbie Halvorson — did not post the letter on their web sites, which is very unusual. One guesses that they are not particularly proud of this particular bit of shameless whoring.
Update: TarheelDem points out, the freshmen reps may not have understood the deception in the letter. And it would be good to call them and tell their staff to make sure the Representative understands that deception.
Medicare negotiating market rates, along with a Public Option available to everyone, are two of the main things in HCR that would help to drive costs down rather than up.
Progressives this week are fighting to accumulate the votes needed to stop any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option. Hopefull they can stop this PhRMA payoff as well. If you’ve got a phone, call your congressman and give him/her hell about this...
So Obama's dilemma is who to please?
So Obama gets elected and swoops into Washington with a big mandate and now the question for him becomes, how do I make all of my various sponsors happy? If you look at the proposals carefully you can see that the whole policy debate is shaped by this dynamic. What is consistently present throughout the policies favored by the White House is an effort to use tax money to subsidize the existing employer-based private system instead of doing the logical thing and taking the bite — for a bite had to be taken out of someone — out of the pharma and insurance industries.