Administration Braces For Setbacks To Health Law

The 'donut-hole' that never should have existed in the first place, and that the DLC-controlled Democrats created as a "compromise" for Bush's Medicare Reform Act of 2003 (another massive corporate giveaway package).  

The whole of Medicare Part D was a scam and a scheme, a "first step" (as Obama's 'most ardent supporters' like to say) towards privatizing public healthcare.

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% 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.

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 k!II 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.

 Oh, and by the way, $80 billion over 10 years is less than 1% of the profits PhRma makes a year.
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