Free Republic

Congressional Democrats said Thursday that they intended to push the Obama administration to back away from its deal with the drug industry to cap its share of the costs in a health care overhaul. A spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she stood by her position that the House was not bound by any such agreement. Ms. Pelosi supports House efforts “to squeeze more money out of the system, including from the pharmaceutical industry,” her spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, said in a statement. Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee and helped write the...

Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion. Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers. In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama...

Caught between a pivotal industry ally and the protests of Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration on Friday backed away from what drug industry lobbyists had said this week was a firm White House promise to exclude from a proposed health care overhaul the possibility of allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices under Medicare. [text excerpted] The full terms of the White House agreement with the drug makers, like a similar deal with the hospital industry, have never been disclosed.