The LA Times reports that Obama is making deals with devils:
As a candidate for president, Barack Obama lambasted drug companies and the influence they wielded in Washington. He even ran a television ad targeting the industry’s chief lobbyist, former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, and the role Tauzin played in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices.
Since the election, Tauzin has morphed into the president’s partner. He has been invited to the White House half a dozen times in recent months. There, he says, he eventually secured an agreement that the administration wouldn’t try to overturn the very Medicare drug policy that Obama had criticized on the campaign trail.
At the same time, Tauzin said the industry he represents was offering political and financial support for the president’s healthcare initiative, a remarkable shift considering that drug companies vigorously opposed a national overhaul the last time it was proposed, when Bill Clinton was president.
If a package passes Congress, the pharmaceutical industry has pledged $80 billion in cost savings over 10 years to help pay for it. For his part, Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe. Both proposals could cost the industry billions, undermine its ability to develop new cures and, in the case of imports, possibly compromise safety, industry officials contend.
And Obama made a campaign-trail promise to hold substantial health-care reform debates in public—on CSPAN!—but that hasn’t happened, either. (Obama’s quote: “We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”) Instead, he’s having closed-door meetings with the lobbyists he criticized during the election.
As a political scientist/health-care analyst says later in the story: “These bargains are the price of admission for achieving substantial reform.”
Still, it sometimes stinks when the rubber hits the road.
BS – Obama has had townhalls all over the place which were covered by the media and c-span. Plus he had the kickoff event in the Whitehouse with all stakeholders present (televised live).
It’s the price you pay when you don’t have the balls to actually put what the Ameircan people want (universal health care at the expense of taxing the rich, per every poll taken this year) on the table and force the Democrats to the left for once.
If you want to appease everyone to the benefit of almost no one, then yeah, you’ll have to suck some Pharma dick.
@2 “It’s the price you pay when you don’t have the balls”
No, it’s the price you pay when your population is ignorant and your government is organized around the concept of “checks and balances” that severely limit how much good or bad the government can do.
Billy Tauzin is the most evil man in America. I thank him profusely everytime I clear out another 20,000 spam emails he legalized the sending of. Then the pharma. Someone should shoot him.
Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.
Imports from Canada are a red herring. All that does is piggyback on Canada’s price controls because we don’t have the political cojones to pass our own.
The problem with this situation is pharma has all the power. Obama doesn’t get to say “This is how we’re going to do this.” They get to call the shots and if they don’t want to discuss things on CSPAN, its not going to happen.
This healthcare “reform”–in which the private health insurance and pharmaceutical companies somehow get to continue to make obscene profits off people’s suffering–is a huge fraud.
Single-payer–with coverage for everyone, price controls, and higher taxes on the rich to pay for it–is the only system that will actually work effectively to reduce costs.
Just drop the age restriction on Medicare already!
After watching Wendell Potter, formerly of Cigna, on Bill Moyers, it reinforced what I knew to be true, that no representatives of big pharma or the insurance companies should be at the negotiating table or anywhere near this legislation. But when we decided that money was the same thing as speech, we allow the game to be permanently rigged to benefit those who can buy the results they want.
Why should one penny be spent to advertise a product that can only be obtained through a doctor? To buy influence with networks in order to control the message, that’s why.
Money makes the world go round
The world go round
The world go round
Why isn’t there a bigger black market for cheap pharmaceuticals? Isn’t the mafia interested in profit anymore?
If he’s making deals with these corporate vultures you can just bet they will continue to skin the American people alive. They spend billions on ads to peddle poisons that are killing people. They spend millions on politicians to stop people from getting their drugs at drastically reduced prices. They are, in a nutshell, monsters. They make the financial sector crooks look like pikers.
the bargains look more like the price of admission for insubstantial, in-name-only reform.
The only deal he should make is that we get single payer national health care that three-quarters of American citizens demand and that the public option plan negotiates forcefully with Big Pharma and slaughters the patent rules so they return to what they were when our nation was founded.
That’s 13 years, bitches.
He failed to change politics. He had a 11 million strong e mail list. If he had pushed that it would be 25 milion by now. If he mobilized grass roots he could fill Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge with 90000 folks, he could fill the seadogs stadium in Portland Maine, he could be dictating to those moderates what to do, but he didn’t. He did not even TRY to change politics as he promised to do during the campaign.
Not only that, he’s doesn’t plan to.
Notice that the promises he’s extracting from the devilish insurance industry aren’t even binding…..”we suck out 5% of gdp for no social benefit at all, so why yes president Obama we have bazillions in obscene scammer profits and we’ll throw a few crumbs back to the public by not gouging so much over the next ten years.”
Why yes we’ve got their verbal promise, woo hoo!
“Negotiating” with a LOUISIANA politician representing big pharma.
“Change.” “Hope.” “Unity.”
“Puke.” “Vomit.” “Disgust.”
(Ps-don’t want to be too angry, bossy or snarky, mygod, wouldn’t want that, so let me add this:
namaste and have a nice day! 🙂 🙂 🙂 !!!!)
All I know is that life with a pre-existing condition can make you wish the disease would just fucking take you already.
And I’m having one of those days.
@16 – you mean like pregnancy – which is a pre-existing condition in some states under some medical plans?
Yeah, the Talibangelists hate kids.
But then, they’re mostly really really old white guys.
@#&^*@%(+!!!!
That’s about the most positive spin I can put on THAT.
You people are stupid and shortsighted. I’m really sure single-payer would have gotten really fucking far in Washington. Grow the fuck up. Yeah yeah, Obama’s a failure on every fucking front because he didn’t change the culture of Washington overnight. Apparently none of you have actually lived in this country for the last three or four decades.