Posted on 02/03/2016 3:26:55 PM PST by Kaslin
Recently, alarming news for those advocating for a sensible health care policy arrived courtesy of Politico Pro: The pharmaceutical industry spent more than $50 million on lobbying last year alone. And, if you can believe this, that's an increase from 2014.
To be fair, 2015 was not a good year for pharma. Martin Shkreli, the bad-boy hedge fund CEO who hiked a drug price from just under $14 to $750 per pill, became known as the "face of U.S. Health Care," to quote an Atlantic story that ran around the time of his decision. And the drug industry seems to have noticed, given that the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) went to great lengths to disavow Shkreli and those like him. According to the publication STAT:
PhRMA, one of the most powerful industry groups in Washington, had watched for several days as Turing Pharmaceuticals and CEO Martin Shkreli were being savaged on social media and on the campaign trail for dramatically raising the price of an anti-parasitic drug. Then, on Sept. 22, PhRMA tweeted that Turing "does not represent the values of @PhRMA member companies."
A month later, the group published a blog post in which it charged that Valeant Pharmaceuticals, immersed in a separate controversy, was "more reflective of a hedge fund than an innovative biopharmaceutical company."
As pharma tries to distance itself from its own worst actors, the industry is using its oversized lobbying muscle to scuttle the 340B drug pricing program.
For those who don't know, 340B is a program that requires pharmaceutical companies who want to participate in Medicaid and Medicare Part B to sell drugs at a lower price to hospitals that serve high numbers of low-income and rural patients. It costs the pharmaceutical industry about $3.8 billion per year in profits, and taxpayers next to nothing. That number might seem like a lot, until you realize that the annual Medicare Part B market alone is worth about $22 billion. In other words, this is mathematically the equivalent of asking the pharmaceutical industry to hand over $1 in order to gain $5. On the Medicaid side of the ledger, that advantage is far greater. And if, by some chance, drug companies don't want to pay that price, they don't have to. 340B is completely voluntary.
Only in a world where pharma shells out tens of millions of dollars to Congress could a proposal to cut something this seemingly commonsensical as 340B not be laughed at for the price gouging nonsense that it is. But apparently, price gouging becomes mainstream if you pay enough to make it so.
Small wonder that the public is getting more and more enamored with Democrats' socialized medicine pipe dreams when an industry this greedy represents the opposition.
If conservatives want to stop corruption, corporate welfare and rent seeking, then taking a big bite out of Big Pharma should be one of their top priorities as we enter election season.
Pharma already bought Congress in 1986.
This why 75% of the population is on some kind of medication or treatment. The whole medical industry is a racket.
Of course they would. We have the finest congress money can buy.
And one wonders why a turd in the street has more respect than a senator or congresscritter.
Too late.
Last year was the first year they didn’t buy congress in a long time. Guess they didn’t keep up their progress payments well enough.
Medicine, harvesting the savings of Boomers so they won’t have to.
When I was growing up, medical expenses were paid out of pocket, there being no need to insure the kids’ health.
Nowadays, costs are so high insurance is the only way to go.
Part of the problem parallels what we went through in the gasoline shortages of the seventies. You remember the kvetching that if gas went over a dollar a gallon, we wouldn’t stand for it. After a while, someone finally admitted that we had to have gasoline and would pay whatever it cost to get it. Medical care is at that stage.
No one comes into the house and forces pills down your throat, though. If medical care cost becomes unacceptable, one can always just die.
I wouldn’t mind big Pharma involved in Congress if the only thing they were doing was giving Congresscritters performance enhancing drugs.
“This why 75% of the population is on some kind of medication or treatment. The whole medical industry is a racket.”
While that may be true in certain sectors of the drug business, pharmaceuticals do tremendous good for millions of people. Your brush is way, way too broad.
Who out bid them?
why not? they already own the VA.
The whole medical industry is a racket.
+100. It makes the supposed “military-industrial complex” look like a 3-store fast food chain.
A turd might actually be useful as fertilizer...
How much did the unions spend?
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