Posted on 12/10/2009 6:07:58 PM PST by jazusamo
A deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry is holding up a bipartisan amendment to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, according to a member of the Senate Democratic leadership.
The Senate has been debating the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), since Tuesday but has not held a vote, which is contributing to a stall in the floor action on healthcare reform.
Dorgan’s measure, which would permit bulk exports of medicines from countries such as Canada, enjoys broad and bipartisan support and likely has the backing of more than 60 senators, which would guarantee its adoption on the healthcare reform bill.
Tension between the White House and Democratic supporters of the so-called drug reimportation amendment is primarily behind the delay, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday.
“There’s a political subtext here,” Durbin said. “It has to do with whether or not we can do as part of the impact on pharma in this bill and whether or not there are other things that are higher priorities.”
The White House and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) struck a deal this summer to limit the drug industry’s financial exposure under reform to $80 billion over 10 years, though its terms have never been fully disclosed.
President Barack Obama was one of the 35 co-sponsors of Dorgan’s drug reimportation legislation when Obama served in the Senate. In addition, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was a leading supporter of the House version of the bill when he served in the lower chamber.
“Many of us support it but wonder if this is the right venue,” Durbin said, but “we don’t want to slow down this bill or stop it over what is an important issue but, I think, takes second place to the overall healthcare reform.”
Asked Wednesday whether the Democratic leadership was whipping its members to support or oppose the Dorgan amendment, Durbin said, “Well, we asked. There was a question asked of members through staff as to how they were inclined but it isn’t like we’re buttonholing people, yes or no, and saying ‘Vote the other way.’”
Several Democratic senators are objecting to moving ahead with the vote because they believe the amendment has enough support to prevail, said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Dorgan’s lead co-sponsor.
“I suspect we haven't had a vote yet because they know it has the votes to pass,” she said.
Democratic senators from states home to pharmaceutical companies, including Tom Carper (Del.), Frank Lautenberg (N.J.) and Robert Menendez (N.J.), object to the amendment, citing concerns about ensuring the safety of medicines entering the U.S. supply chain from foreign sources. Congress Daily has reported that Carper (D-Del.) placed a hold on the amendment, but his office refused to comment to The Hill.
The Dorgan amendment is co-sponsored by 19 senators, including Snowe and John McCain (R-Ariz.), who have been leading the floor debate. On Thursday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Lautenberg had offered an alternative to the Dorgan amendment; both amendments will come to a vote at the same time, Reid said.
The Obama administration has sent out mixed messages about drug reimportation this week.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs insisted Tuesday that Obama has not changed his stance. “The president said during the campaign that he did. [He] said so in his first budget, assuming that safety concerns … could be addressed. And I think that’s the key.”
The same day, however, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, an Obama appointee, issued a letter to senators saying her agency believed Dorgan’s amendment would endanger the U.S. medicine supply and be difficult to enforce. “There are significant safety concerns,” Hamburg wrote. The Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA issued similar cautions during the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations.
The message did not seem mixed to McCain, whom Obama defeated in the race for the White House last year. “The fix is in,” he said.
The White House’s unusual alliance with PhRMA has proved a mixed blessing for Democrats.
At a minimum, the arrangement between the White House, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and PhRMA neutralized a powerful potential opponent. At best, the partnership could provide Democrats with a deep-pocketed ally as their quest for healthcare reform reaches its final stages.
But the handshake deal between the White House and PhRMA also angered powerful congressional Democratic committee chairmen and rank-and-file lawmakers who want to take aim at the drug industry on issues such as drug reimportation and Medicare payment rates for pharmaceuticals.
One more way the rats can screw us - chinese drugs!
The whole thing is a stall... stall, in a commode sort of way.
Hopefully they stall until the bill is killed.
Do you know where your drugs come from now?
You got that right.
Just another attempt at ‘anything but America’. What’s this ‘bipartisan’?
“Walmart gets generics from India—I asked. If companies can, why not the people on their own?”
The issue isn’t generics. It’s brand name drugs: we give companies patent protection so that they have an economic incentive to create new drugs. They essentially pay themselves back for the $1 billion average cost of getting a new drug to market by charging monopoly prices for a time-limited period. Once that period is over, part of the patent “deal” is that they have to have revealed to the world the “recipe” for the new drug they created. That enables generic competitors to come in and manufacture and sell the drug for a much lower cost (since they have no front-end research/discovery costs to recover). So it’s a win-win situation: we get a constant stream of new drugs and everyone benefits from the much lower drug prices that occur from competition by generics.
But like an airplane willing to sell its last few empty seats at a deep discount (once it knows it has enough paying passengers to cover the flight’s cost), drug companies sell their brand name drugs to foreign countries at a deep discount (30-50% lower than the U.S. price). But they do so only on the restriction that such drugs be used by that country’s citizens—not sold back to Americans so that foreign countries or drug distributors can make a quick buck.
In reality, other countries are “free-riding” on U.S. R&D in pharma: they get the benefits of brand-name drugs without paying the prices that cover the costs to find and develop them. But the solution to that problem is not to encourage Americans to join the free-riding bandwagon. Such a short-sighted policy would give us short-lived benefits (lower prices) but the long run costs of such a policy (fewer new drugs if drug companies can’t expect to be paid enough to cover the costs of finding them) would vastly exceed these benefits.
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