A Senate Democratic leader is hoping to blow up the deal reached between the White House, drug makers and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), by introducing an amendment on the floor to allow prescription drugs to be re-imported from Canada.
It's one of the simplest ways to reduce health care costs but was ruled out by the agreement, which limits Big Pharma's contribution to health care reform to $80 billion over ten years.
North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, a member of Democratic leadership, isn't a party to that bargain. "Senator Dorgan intends to offer an amendment to the health reform bill and his expectation is that it will be one of the first amendments considered," his spokesman Justin Kitsch told HuffPost in an e-mail. "Prescription drug importation is an immediate way to put downward pressure on health care costs. It has bipartisan support, and has been endorsed by groups such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses and AARP."
U.S. patients pay far more than the rest of the world for prescription drugs. The Canadian government keeps prices down by using its purchasing power to negotiate for lower rates. Dorgan wants American consumers in on the deal. A bill to allow re-importation -- S. 1232 - has 30 cosponsors, several Republicans among them, including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, John Thune (S.D.) and David Vitter (La.).
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would result in $50 billion in direct savings over the next decade, with $10.6 billion of that being savings to the federal government. Read it all at Huffington Post
The first big fight over the Senate Finance Committee’s health care legislation erupted Tuesday night: a rollicking brawl over a deal that the Obama administration cut with the pharmaceutical industry to achieve $80 billion in savings on drug costs over 10 years, money that would help pay for the legislation.
Top House Democrats have hated the deal from the get-go. Senate Democrats are now bitterly divided. And Senate Republicans are eagerly jumping into the fray to needle the Democrats over their divisions. The fight over the deal with PhRMA actually stems from the legislative battle over the Medicare prescription drug legislation that Republicans successfully pushed through Congress in 2003. As a result of that legislation, about 6 million elderly Americans who had been receiving drug benefits under Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, were instead shifted into the new Medicare drug program, resulting in the government paying far high prices for drugs.
Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, and now the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has long complained about that switch. And the House health care legislation, of which Mr. Waxman is a main author, seeks to reverse the arrangement and to recoup the extra money that the government has been spending by restoring the old Medicaid drug discounts or “rebates” as they are known.
That would save the government at least $86 billion over 10 years, but would potentially cost the drug industry far more. The White House has said that its deal with PhRMA would help narrow a gap in Medicare coverage of prescription drugs that is know as the doughnut hole, which forces people to pay some of their drug costs after a certain level. But there are also questions about the extent to which the drug industry also benefits, because the increased drug coverage for seniors means that the government will pay for more medication on their behalf, particularly brand-name drugs. In some cases, seniors now stop taking medication or switch to generics when they reach the doughnut hole.
Since the White House reached its deal with PhRMA in June there has been some disagreement between the industry and the administration over the precise terms of the arrangement. PhRMA has insisted that the White House agreed not to seek any additional concessions from drug manufacturers and to block Mr. Waxman’s plan in the House legislation. And the industry said that its support of the health overhaul was specifically aimed at Mr. Baucus’s proposal.
Mr. Baucus had previously announced that the first votes on amendments would not take place until Wednesday, so a final outcome of the fight was postponed. Read it all at NYTimes.com
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.
The move would be a follow-up to the deal that drug makers struck in June with Mr. Baucus and the White House. Under that pact, the industry agreed to various givebacks and discounts meant to reduce the nation’s pharmaceutical spending by $80 billion over 10 years.
Shortly after striking that agreement, the trade group — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA — also set aside $150 million for advertising to support health care legislation. Up to now, the trade group, led by former Representative Billy Tauzin, a Republican from Louisiana, has contributed $12 million toward an advertising campaign coordinated by a coalition called Americans for Stable Quality Care. Early advertisements focused on general subjects like “Eight Ways Reform Matters to You.”
But an industry official involved in the discussions said the group and its advertising money would now be aimed specifically at the approach being pushed by Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Read it all on the Prescriptions Blog at NYTimes.com
File under "Been there. Done That"
Somehow, lots of political observers have forgotten that [...] triggers are the template that the health care industry has long been using to destroy any kind of reform. And if there's any subset of Democratic congressional lawmakers who should know that, it is the progressives. The obvious lesson is that despite the rhetoric surrounding them, triggers have been proven to serve one purpose and one purpose only - to protect the interests of the health care status quo. That's not a fact - that's historical truth proven every time an American walks into a drugstore and is forced to pay the highest prices for medicines in the world.
What's amazing is that, knowing this history, anyone could think triggers are even good politics. Re-importation bills have been passed a few times now, each time with poison-pill trigger provisions. Each time, politicians publicly pretend this is some great victory and expect consumers to buy the charade. And then each time consumers walk into a drugstore and get gouged on medicine, thanks in part to the legislative poison pill, consumers find out they've been duped by those same politicians.
It's no stretch to think that this is exactly what will happen if overall health care reform is destroyed by triggers - only on a much bigger scale. If Congress passes a health care bill and trumpets a public option that is undermined by triggers, consumers are very quickly going to find out what really happened. When there is no public option because those triggers were (as they will inevitably be) written to make a public option impossible (just like they were written to make re-importation impossible), consumers will realize they've been treated like gullible fools, and not just on one part of health care reform (prescription drugs), but on all of it.
At that point, my bet is you'll see a kind of anger that makes today's Glenn Beck-inspired tea parties seem mild.
There is, certainly, one sliver of hope in all this, and it rests with leaders of the Progressive Caucus. Many of them were in Congress and invested a lot of time and energy in pushing the re-importation bill (and rightly so). Thus, many of them know firsthand that the trigger mechanism is designed only to destroy health care legislation, and not to accomplish some higher goal. So maybe, just maybe, they will take that firsthand knowledge and use it to strengthen their own resolve to stand against triggers and vote against any bill without a robust public option. Read it all here in the Denver Post.
From The Nation:
What the country needs--what Obama needs, whether he realizes it or not--is an independent, mobilized, progressive citizens' movement that takes on the corporate lobbies, from Big Pharma to Big Oil to Wall Street; challenges the legislators who are in their pockets; and demands affordable national healthcare, renewable energy, empowerment of workers, regulation of Wall Street and more. That movement should go after the conservatives and the compromised in both parties--anyone who stands in the way of reform.
The obstruction by Republicans and the right is real and must be opposed. But so should the back-room guile of the moneyed lobbies and their Democratic allies. If we are going to get the change we need, progressives will have to challenge those in both parties who can't see which way the wind is blowing.
Big Pharma, whose lobbying winning streak shows no sign of ending, has lured Democrats into a Faustian bargain.
In exchange for a $150 million advertising campaign featuring a sadder and sicker Harry and Louise, drug industry lobbyists have quietly been handed almost everything they wanted out of health care reform legislation. Read it all
A must read...
"One piece of alleged news this weekend has been a deal between Senator Baucus (D-corporate lobbyist) and Billy' Tauzin, president and chief executive of PhRMA and a former congressman from Louisiana (D to R to corporate lobbyist). It is important to remember that as a congressman, just before exiting via the rotating door to his official lobbyist gig, Tauzin was a leader in fixing Medicare Part D to be a huge protected benefit for the drug companies. Remember: When they say that Medicare was not allowed to negotiate a lower price, this means they were not allowed to even get the same "discount" ("special, just for you") rate the U.S. government was already getting for benefits under Medicaid, DOD, Veterans and those eligible for 340B pricing.
One horrible, but deliberately planned result, is that many seniors and the disabled, who had been dually eligible for lower drug prices under Medicaid, wound up paying (either under Medicare or out-of-pocket) HIGHER prices to the drug companies under Medicare Part D, than they had before. Expensive for taxpayers, poor seniors and the disabled, but a windfall for the drug companies.
In one of the more blatant examples of the corrupt system, Tauzin was a leader in making Medicare Part D so bad for government, taxpayer and the elderly but so good for the drug industry, while he was at the same time secretly negotiating his near future job as chief lobbyist for the same industry. This was of course with the Bush white house and the corrupt D.C.-lobbyist leadership of the AARP (which is to a great extent a for-profit insurance company, and not a senior-rights organization). We already subsidize most of the underlying research (and the training of the drug companies' researchers) via the National Institutes of Health. When the same drug is offered to at a lower cost to purchaser -- be it at DOD or France or Canada, etc -- and at a higher cost to us, then we are suckers being asked to subsidize that too.
The Baucus-Tauzin "deal" is just an attempt to cut-off the debate and fast-track a great deal for PhRMA and a really bad deal for America. Read it all here:
Today, former senators Tom Daschle and Bob Dole released a plan for health care reform that is being hailed a bipartisan way forward. Headlines blare about the Daschle/Dole plan for health care. But were these two to not have had illustrious careers in the Senate, the headlines would tell a far different story: “Health Care Lobbyists Release Health Care Plan.”
Both Daschle and Dole work for a major Washington, DC lobbying firm, Alston & Bird. Many of Alston & Bird’s major clients are from the health care sector including the American Hospital Association, HealthSouth Corp, and pharmaceutical companies Abbott Laboratories, Bayer, Celgene, and Mylan Laboratories. In total, Alston & Bird is currently representing 31 clients from the health care sector. Of the $2,730,000 reported income received from clients, nearly 50% of that, $1,070,000, comes from these 31 health care clients.
This looks like another benefit of the revolving door. You can release a legislative proposal from outside of Congress and the first thing anyone thinks of is your previous job and not your current one. Read the rest at the Sunlight Foundation Blog
Well worth watching.
Sen. Sanders discussed his views on health care legislation now being debated in Congress. He is the among the Senate's strongest proponents of a single-payer, government-financed health care system, and has introduced the Senate's only single-payer health care plan. S. 703, The American Health Security Act. C-SPAN Video here
From Robert Reich's Blog
I'ved poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.
You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, 'unfair' is anything that undermines their profits.
So they're pulling out all the stops -- pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called "moderate" Republicans who say they're in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers. Enter Olympia Snowe. Her move is important, not because she's Republican (the Senate needs only 51 votes to pass this) but because she's well-respected and considered non-partisan, and therefore offers some cover to Democrats who may need it. Last night Snowe hosted a private meeting between members and staffers about a new proposal Pharma and Insurance are floating, and apparently she's already gained the tentative support of several Democrats (including Ron Wyden and Thomas Carper). Under Snowe's proposal, the public option would kick in years from now, but it would be triggered only if insurance companies fail to bring down healthcare costs and expand coverage in he meantime.
What's the catch? First, these conditions are likely to be achieved by other pieces of the emerging legislation; for example, computerized records will bring down costs a tad, and a mandate requiring everyone to have coverage will automatically expand coverage. If it ever comes to it, Pharma and Insurance can argue that their mere participation fulfills their part of the bargain, so no public option will need to be triggered. Second, as Pharma and Insurance well know, "years from now" in legislative terms means never. There will never be a better time than now to enact a public option. If it's not included, in a few years the public's attention will be elsewhere. All this will be decided within days or weeks. And once those who want to kill the public option without their fingerprints on the murder weapon begin to agree on a proposal -- Snowe's "trigger" or any other -- the public option will be very hard to revive. The White House must now insist on a genuine public option. And you, dear reader, must insist as well.
This is it, folks. The concrete is being mixed and about to be poured. And after it's poured and hardens, universal health care will be with us for years to come in whatever form it now takes. Let your representative and senators know you want a public option without conditions or triggers -- one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies, and pushes insurers to do what they've promised to do. Don't wait until the concrete hardens and we've lost this battle.
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