Taibbi: PhRMA’s Big Bribe Comes In

[seafan]

Matt Taibbi writes on September 14, 2009:

The drug industry’s trade group plans to roll out a series of television advertisements in coming weeks specifically to support Senator Max Baucus’s health care overhaul proposal, according to an industry official involved in the planning.

via Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

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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.

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.

Tauzin, who has never been one for subtlety or finesse (he took his $2 million-a-year PhRMA job about ten seconds after he finished pushing through the Prescription Drug Benefit bill), stupidly later revealed some of the contents of that shady meeting, saying that the White House had “blessed” a plan involving the $150 million. He disclosed to reporters that he had extracted a promise from the White House to drop two important reforms: one, to allow the government to negotiate bulk rates for drugs in Medicare, and the other to permit the importation of cheap drugs from Canada (which was once an Obama campaign saw).

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.

So here’s what started happening to kill Waxman’s language. First of all, PhRMA started paying its bribe.

The $150 million it committed to support Obama’s bill is now being rolled out in pro-reform ads, which are being aired mostly in the districts of freshman congressmen. The ads are cheesy, half-hearted tripe blandly supporting the weak-as-fuck remnants of Obama’s health care plan, an example being ....

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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.

What does this letter say? Does it argue that the PhRMA language is better for America than the Waxman language? Does it say it will cost taxpayers less and provide cheaper drugs to more people? Hilariously, no. What it says is that this PhRMA language, while worse than the Waxman language, is not quite so bad as you think (it doesn’t save as much as the Waxman language, but it still has a 50 percent price reduction, which isn’t terrible!). Moreover, the letter says, substituting this language will help the bill get passed! Here’s the actual language, addressed primarily to Waxman:

“Your efforts to remove this onerous burden on Medicare beneficiaries… are to be greatly commended. However the commitment by President Obama and the AARP to support legislation that would provide a 50 percent reduction is a dramatic step forward in helping fill the doughnut hole. Equally important, it moves us toward our goal of health care legislation.”

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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.

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The text of the Shuler/Halvorson letter to Waxman, signed by 70 freshmen and Blue Dogs is here. (Hat tip to Jane Hamsher)



And here are the signees:


Heath Shuler
Mike Ross
Glenn Nye
Michael Arcuri
John Barrow
Jim Himes
Gerry Connolly
Jason Altmire
Steve Driehaus
Lincoln Davis
Christopher Carney
Parker Griffith
Melissa Bean
Larry Kissell
Kathy Dahlkemper
Albio Sires
Allen Boyd
Jim Costa
Kurt Schrader
Leonard Boswell
Walt Minnick
Alan Grayson
Travis Childers
Michael Michaud
Dennis Moore
Corrine Brown
Mike McIntyre
Charlie Melancon
Harry Mitchell
Collin Peterson
Dan Boren
Bill Foster
Paul Hodes
Zachary Space
David Wu
Deborah Halvorson
Donald Payne
David Scott
Charles Wilson
Suzanne Kosmas
Frank Kratovil
Kendrick Meek
Loretta Sanchez
Ann Kirkpatrick
Gary Peters
Hank Johnson
Bobby Bright
Eric Massa
Rush Holt
John Adler
John Tanner
Gregory Meeks
Carolyn McCarthy
Tim Holden
Joe Donnelly
Michael McMahon
Andre Carson
Ben Chandler
Al Green
John Salazar
Bennie Thompson
Sanford Bishop
Scott Murphy
Jim Matheson
Joe Baca
Henry Cuellar
Baron Hill
Daniel Maffei
Wm. Lacy Clay
Adam Smith




Taibbi concludes:

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This fight on the Hill over health care is extremely interesting and also a very important moment in our history. It was somewhat accidental that the Democrats decided this year to even try this reform; it probably wouldn’t have happened had not a certain segment of their campaign contributors, most notably the major manufacturers like the auto companies, seen their businesses start to crater in part because of health care costs. That’s where the top-down momentum for actually doing something about our absurdly inefficient system probably came from.

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.

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On the road to trying to pull this appalling snow job off, however, the Obama administration has stumbled on opposition from both sides. Obviously it will be an enormous victory if progressives can somehow get passed a bill with a real public option and reform of drug prices. But failing that, it would be a very important achievement just to kill the bill entirely. It seldom happens that the public is awake and focused enough to have this kind of OK Corral confrontation with the DC oligarchy, and it has to take advantage.

This is going to be the mother of all battles.

Call your Congress members and keep pushing the hell out of them to support the people over the corporations.

It's coming down to the wire.

[dmr]

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[Hannah Bell]

2. kick