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Drug-import legislation dies in Senate

Mike Lillis — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:59:38 +0000

In a big win for the pharmaceutical industry, the Senate on Tuesday killed legislation that would have made it easier for Americans to buy their prescription drugs from abroad, where prices are generally much cheaper.

The final tally was 51 to 48, nine shy of the supporters needed to overcome a filibuster. Thirty Democrats and Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut voted to kill the provision. Both Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley voted in favor of the measure.

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, has been a week-long thorn in the side of Democratic leaders — not because they opposed the provision, but because it threatened to undermine a deal cut earlier in the year between the White House and the nation’s pharmaceutical companies. Under that agreement, the drug makers pledged up to $80 billion toward health-care reform over the next decade if Democratic leaders would withhold their support for several proposals that would cut further into the companies’ profits, including the drug re-importation provision. As a result, White House officials in recent days had urged Democrats to oppose the Dorgan-Snowe amendment, with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) writing a letter to senators warning that the agency “does not have clear authority over foreign supply chains.”

Under the provision, Americans would be allowed to buy FDA-approved drugs from certain countries with well-established drug-safety regimes, such as Canada, Australia, Japan and those in Europe. Supporters say it will save U.S. consumers roughly $80 billion over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government would save an additional $20 billion over the same span, the result of savings to federally funded programs like Medicare.

The reason is clear: Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than any other country in the world. Dorgan pointed out that the same Nexium prescription that costs $424 in the U.S. would cost just $67 in France, $40 in the United Kingdom, $37 in Germany and $36 in Spain.

“We shouldn’t be paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs,” Dorgan said. “I think it’s flat-out unfair.”

Grassley, who had signed on as a co-sponsor of the amendment, said its passage would mean the pharmaceutical industry “would no longer have free rein to force American consumers to pay more than their fair share of the high cost of research and development.” He also said he considers the idea a free-trade issue.

Opponents of drug re-importation argue (1) that there’s no good way to ensure that imported drugs are safe for American consumers, and (2) that the resulting loss in drug-maker revenues would curb the research conducted by those companies, leading to the discovery and development of fewer new innovative drugs.

Critics of the latter are quick to point out that the pharmaceutical industry is perennially among the most profitable. Indeed, last year it ranked third among all industries, reaping 19.3 cents in profits for every $1 in revenues, according to Fortune Magazine.

Senate lawmakers Tuesday also killed a weaker substitute to the Dorgan-Snowe amendment, sponsored by Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J. Both argued that the Dorgan amendment simply wouldn’t guarantee that the imported drugs were safe. Strangely enough, both also voted in 2007 in favor of proceeding to a similar Dorgan-Snowe bill.

“It’s regressive,” Menendez said Tuesday. “It harkens back to a time when the lack of sufficient drug regulation allowed people to sell snake oil and magic elixirs that promised everything and did nothing.”

Critics in and out of the Capitol, however, say the substitute was so stringent that it will effectively prohibit drug importation. The AARP, which for years, has endorsed the Dorgan-Snowe amendment, argued that the Lautenberg-Menendez provision represents “a thinly veiled effort to undermine importation and preserve the status quo of high drug prices.”

The substitute amendment was shot down by a count of 56 to 43.

The debate proved difficult for President Barack Obama, who had endorsed reimportation on the campaign trail but was forced to change his tune this year for fear of losing the pharmaceutical lobby’s support for the underlying health-care reform bill.

“When you become president, you realize that the sound bites don’t always work in reality,” Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, told The Washington Post this week.

The money that the drug makers have pumped into Congress in recent months couldn’t have hurt their case. Indeed, the industry has contributed roughly $7.5 million to lawmakers this year, with 57 percent going to Democrats — up from 33 percent in the 2006 cycle, and 50 percent in the 2008 cycle – according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

In terms of lobbying, the dollar figures are even higher. CRP found that PhRMA, which represents the brand-name drug makers, has spent more than $20 million lobbying Congress this year alone.

“It’s really regrettable that the special interests prevail, and the power of the pharmaceutical lobby,” Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said Tuesday. “It’s not one of the most admirable chapters in the history of the United States Senate.”

Mike Lillis covers Congress for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

COMMENTARY: Obama Leaves No Aftertaste In Rural America With ‘Bitter’ Remarks

Douglas Burns — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:00:14 +0000

Rural Americans, of both the bitter and optimistic variety, really don’t have much of a problem with Barack Obama’s closed-door (but open-mike) characterizations of many of us.

We are exhausted with two weeks of effete urban commentators, caffeinated with $4 lattes and speaking through studio-makeup-shined faces, telling us what we think about what Obama said.

And, yes, we can smell Hillary Clinton’s contrived outrage, her false fury over the remarks, for what it is: political opportunism, the carbohydrates fueling the Clintons’ royal run.

You see, we don’t have to guess on this one. We don’t need talking heads on MSNBC to do our figuring and ciphering. Here in western Iowa’s small towns we actually got to know Obama about as well as any voters in contemporary American presidential politics can.

As a reporter and columnist based in Carroll, the hub of west-central Iowa, I tracked Obama’s schedule for the nearly one-year campaign in Iowa. Some days, Obama would be in five, six or more small communities.

I’d give Obama better odds at finding his way from Carroll to Sioux City without a map than any of the pundits calling him elite.

Speaking as a small-town American (Carroll has a population of 10,000) I can say this: We want a president smarter than everyone we know. Obama passes that test. Does it make him “elite” in our eyes? Yes, but in the manner of a standout student, a superior speaker, not an out-of-touch pol.

This isn’t to give Obama a free pass with what he said earlier this month at a fund-raiser in San Francisco:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.
“And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not.
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama made a classic American mistake with these hyper-chronicled meanderings about “bitter” small-town people.

You can’t joke or characterize people who don’t live and look like you. Even if, well, you are right.

As a white, rural man, I am on a foundation of quicksand should I write anything about Bill Cosby’s assessment of the African-American community’s values implosion or repeat challenging comments Hispanic friends make about their own evolving culture in western Iowa.

But I can tell you that Obama, while talking like white men dance with those San Francisco comments, is on firm factual footing.

In his groundbreaking book “What’s The Matter With Kansas,” Thomas Frank could just as easily have been talking about western Iowa when he probes deeply into why working-class people vote against their own economic interests.

“How is that the Kansas conservative rebels profess to hate elites but somehow excuse from their fury the corporate world, even when it has so manifestly (hurt) them?” says Frank.

Moreover, he writes, “Apparently there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.”

We see it right here in western Iowa in our desperate small towns.

“Walk down the main street of just about any farm town in the state, and you know immediately what they’re talking about: this is a civilization in the early stages of irreversible decay,” Frank writes of Kansas.

Why do people who live in dilapidated homes in Iowa’s forlorn villages, people whose first electric light may have come through the Rural Electricification Administration, people who live in a land capitalism long since left behind, vote for corporate-shilling, government-bashing conservatives?

Conservative Iowa politicians and their followers are actors in a tragic play. They posture as independent pioneers living in mud huts and getting by with just a mule and plow, plenty of pluck and nary a buck from Uncle Sam.

But Iowa – and western Iowa to even greater degree – is reliant on the federal government in the way of a newborn and his mother’s milk. In short, rural America needs the federal government.

All of this doesn’t make for good political brochures, and dependence is not the image we want to project. It does happen to be true, though. The proof is in the cashed checks.

Consider this fact alone: From 1995 to 2002, total U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidies for farms in Carroll County stood at $114 million, with 2,348 recipients, according to a federal database used by the Associated Press and The Des Moines Register. Our American way of life of preservation of the food supply demand that these subsidies continue.

That considered, does any thinking person believe Obama’s brief and failed turn as a rural anthropologist will hurt him more than what Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today in Alabama?

“We must reduce barriers to imports, to things like ethanol from Brazil, and we’ve got to stop subsidizing ethanol in my view,” Senator McCain said.

If the ivory-towered urban elites hawking their tiresome flyover views on cable television each night want to see what a bitter small-town American looks like, they can come to western Iowa during the second year of what we have every reason to expect would be a decidedly anti-rural John McCain presidency.

Barack Obama misspoke. John McCain didn’t.

Rural Americans know the difference.