Obama’s mother-of-all broken campaign promises on prescription drugs

Posted by Bill Dupray on Dec 16 2009 Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Yeah, I know they all break campaign promises, but this has to be among the brassiest, most cynical and craven political lies in decades. As you listen to this promise (it’s short, watch the whole thing), is there a single thing that Obama says about crooked, back-room dealing politicians in bed with the pharmaceutical companies that doesn’t apply directly to him this morning?

No C-Span. No transparency. Just a smokey back-room deal of the exact type he railed against last year.

A memo obtained by the Huffington Post confirms that the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby secretly agreed to precisely the sort of wide-ranging deal that both parties have been denying over the past week. . . .

It says the White House agreed to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government’s leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada — and also agreed not to pursue Medicare rebates or shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D, which would cost Big Pharma billions in reduced reimbursements.

Dana Milbank at WaPo also noticed that the whopper of a lie came to fruition last night with the defeat of the Dorgan amendment.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to take on the drug industry by allowing Americans to import cheaper prescription medicine. “We’ll tell the pharmaceutical companies ‘thanks, but no, thanks’ for the overpriced drugs — drugs that cost twice as much here as they do in Europe and Canada,” he said back then.

On Tuesday, the matter came to the Senate floor — and President Obama forgot the “no, thanks” part. Siding with the pharmaceutical lobby, the administration successfully fought against the very idea Obama had championed.

“It’s got to be a little awkward,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.).

Free-marketeers will argue that the only reason drug prices are lower in foreign countries is because socialized medicine allows the governments in Canada and other places to set the prices of drugs. This is entirely antithetical to capitalism and ultimately confiscates drug company profits, arrived at after billions of R&D dollars are spent. Setting prices, or allowing importation of those cheaper drugs, which just allows another country to do the dirty work for us, only reduces the effectiveness and ability of companies to develop new drugs.

So the vote against the Dorgan amendment won’t bother capitalists. But for liberals who dislike capitalism in general, big corporations in particular, and drug companies especially, this has to be a galling stab in the back. Obama flat out lied to them twice. Not only did he not pursue reimportation of drugs; inaction is bad enough. But he went one step further by taking sides and jumping in bed with the pharmaceutical companies and making a secret deal.

And the C-Span cameras were nowhere in sight.