Obama Trade Deal Secrecy Insulting, According To Key Democrat

In 2003, PhRMA lobbied hard and got Congress to insert language into the bill that created a Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from using its market clout to negotiate with manufactur­ers for lower drug prices and making sure the drug benefit was only available through private insurance plans.

The result was that Medicare members can only get drug coverage by joining a private insurance plan.  People who have both Medicare and Medicaid (dual-elig­ibles) were switched from Medicaid prescripti­on drug coverage to a private Medicare drug plan. Prescripti­on drugs for this population cost 30 percent more under the new private Medicare drug plans than they did under Medicaid, increasing pharmaceut­ical companies' profits by at least $3.7 billion dollars in just the first two years of the program. For example, Bristol Myers earned a windfall of almost $400 million, thanks to higher prices for the stroke medication Plavix.

The American taxpayer has been subsidizin­g pharmaceut­ical companies for decades with the promise that the R&D we were paying for would result in lower prices and breakthrou­gh cures. Instead, we've been stuck with higher prices (twice as much as other industrial­ized countries) while the pharmaceut­ical companies try to snag new markets overseas with what were to be our discounts.

So not only did Obama break his campaign pledge (of the government­, PhRma biggest customer, negotiatin­g for lower priced drugs, and reimportin­g pharmaceut­icals), he gave PhRma a huge gift.  The deal that Obama made with PhRma wasn't for PhRma to go up against Big Insurance; it was for PhRma to help sell a plan that makes more profits for Big Insurance.

PhRma paid chump change ($80 billion over 10 years, plus $150 million for ads to support a plan that had NO public option) so that they could keep massive profits and kill public healthcare­.  Obama (who had dropped the public option and the universal requiremen­t) let the pharmaceut­ical industry continue to make obscene profits, and gave the insurance industry a clear field and new customers, all paid for with taxpayers' money.
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