Big Pharma Lobbyist - Prescription Drug Bill Allow Drug Company To Charge Medicare/Medicaid $1,000.00/Pill For Drug That Cost $1.00 To Make

Hepatitis C Drug Cost $1 to Make - Iliad Sciences Charges Medicare $1,000.00/Pill

Photo credit to KTTN/KGOZ Radio

John A. Smith, Founder/Editor, October 13, 2016

Why Can't Medicare Negotiate Drug Prices

     It started in 2003 when Medicare was expanded to include medications. George W. Bush and Republicans sold out to Big Pharma payoffs and forced the passing of the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act. (aka the "Prescription Drug Bill.") The vote was unprecedented because as the vote was going on and the Republicans seen they might not have the votes to pass the bill, they held the vote open for hours. While holding the vote open for hours they "twisted the arms" of their own members by telling them that if they didn't vote to pass the bill the Republican Party would run someone against them in a primary in their next election. Once they got the required votes they quickly ended the voting.

Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act

Long title	An act to amend title XVIII of the Social Security Act to provide for a voluntary prescription drug benefit under the medicare program and to strengthen and improve the medicare program, and for other purposes.
Acronyms (colloquial)	Medicare Modernization Act or MMA
Citations
Public law	108 - 173
Legislative history
Introduced in the House as Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003 by Representative Dennis J. Hastert on June 25, 2003 Passed the House on June 27, 2003 (216 - 215, 1 Present) Passed the Senate on July 7, 2003 (Unanimous Consent) Reported by the joint conference committee on November 21, 2003; agreed to by the House on November 22, 2003 (220 - 215) and by the Senate on November 25, 2003 (54 - 44) Signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 8, 2003 So Who Profited From The Bill? - And Who Lost?  The Winners       The biggest winner is obviously Big PharMa. After passage of the bill they could charge Medicare and Medicaid any price they wanted for a drug. A common heart medication that cost Medicare $234/yr immediately went to $1,600.00/yr. This went on right across the board.   (From Wikipedia:)   "W.J."Billy" Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee from 2001 until February 4, 2004 was one of the chief architects of the new Medicare law.[6][7] In 2004 when Tauzin was appointed as chief lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade association and lobby group for the drug industry with a "rumored salary of $2 million a year,"[6] drawing criticism from a Washington-based Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group."      In fact, all 29 original sponsors of the bill, within 2 years of the bill passing, were either lobbying or directly working for a pharmaceutical company with a hefty salary.  The Losers: Taxpayers      Costs:  The Republicans knew very well that passing this bill was going to give Big PharMa a gigantic windfall due to the fact that Medicare would not be able to negotiate drug prices even though they should have the biggest "buying power" on this earth and under-played what the cost would be. (From Wikipedia:) "Initially, the net cost of the program was projected at $400 billion for the ten-year period between 2004 and 2013. Administration official Thomas Scully instructed analyst Richard Foster not to tell Congress of Foster's finding that the cost would actually be over $500 billion. One month after passage, the administration estimated that the net cost of the program over the period between 2006 (the first year the program started paying benefits) and 2015 would be $534 billion.[14] As of February 2009, the projected net cost of the program over the 2006 to 2015 period was $549.2 billion.[15] ."   In That Bill Was the Provision That Medicare and Medicaid Could NOT Negotiate Drug Prices       The Veteran's Administration did well in refusing to give their right to negotiate drug prices away and was able to stay out of this. However Medicare and Medicaid had no choice and the Republicans gave that right away.       "Through 2012, Medicare Part D added $318 billion to the national debt (see “General Revenue” on Page 111 in the 2013 Medicare trustees report). That same report projects that Medicare Part D will add $852 billion to the debt over the next 10 years." READ MORE: Medicare Part D: Republican Budget-Busting        Former President George W. Bush LIED  to Congress and the American public. "  The Bush White House lied to Congress about the cost. Within two months of signing the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) into law, President Bush quietly informed Congress that the true cost of the program would be $550 billion, not $395 billion, over the next decade. When Medicare actuary Richard Foster sought to present the true price tag to Congress in late 2003, then agency chief Thomas Scully threatened to fire him. By the time the program was launched in 2006, the estimated 10 year price tag for the Medicare prescription plan had increased to $720 billion."  To attack Obamacare, Republicans forget the lessons of Bush's Medicare reform

George W. Bush Lied to America About This Prescription Drug Bill Just As He Did About Iraq To Get Us Into War That Killed More Than 4,000 U.S. Troops - Only This Time It Was To Give Big Pharma and Republicans A Windfall! 

From: Prescription Drug Bill: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Brookings

     "The House voted first. At the end of the customary 15 minutes allocated for electronic voting, the bill seemed to be failing. The Republican leadership held open the voting for nearly three hours until they succeeded in arm-twisting a few G.O.P. opponents into switching their votes from nay to aye. A few Democrats were ready to shift their votes into the negative column, but their leadership failed to get them back to the floor in time, and the chair gaveled the vote closed. The bill passed the House by a single vote."

     "The Democratic opposition was breathtakingly mismanaged. That hoary quip by Will Rogers—”I do not belong to any organized political party; I am a Democrat”—never seemed more apt."

      "The bill indisputably and significantly deepens an already horrendous fiscal mess. Plausible projections indicate that over the decade 2005-2014 cumulative federal budget deficits will run to about $4.7 trillion. The Medicare bill will add just under $600 billion in that decade and $1.5 to $2 trillion in the succeeding decade, when deficits will explode. Closing these deficits would require either reneging on these benefits or enormous tax increases." READ MORE

     The biggest thing that bothers me, there are many, is that 29 original Republican sponsors of this bill left public service and were given jobs by large pharmaceutical companies for payment, for getting this bill passed. It will cost taxpayers Trillions of dollars and individual Medicare recipients much more. The former President Bush outright lied, just like he did after sending Ambassador Joe Walsh overseas to find out if Iraq had purchased a large amount of material to biuld nuclear bombs. When Joe Walsh came back and told him there was no way that Iraq could have bought the materials former President Bush went on TV and to Congress and outright lied and said yes, they did make that purchase and we went to war. When Joe Walsh couldn't keep quiet about such a lie he went public and the Bush administration attacked him and his family. They first exposed his wife Valerie Plume as being a CIA operative which not only put her in danger but also many other CIA operatives, but they didn't care, they needed to stop him from telling the truth. You might remember Scooty Libby, a close friend to the one pulling all the strings Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney got very mad at Bush for not giving Libby a pardon in his conviction of what they did to Valeria Plume and Joe Walsh. Bush and Cheney were angry at each other ever since then, and never really put up with each other after that. Those 29 Republicans who sponsored the bill and took jobs with large pharmaceutical companies for payment for passing the "Prescription Drug Bill" all left public service within two years of passing the bill and are all making millions of dollars a year, while taxpayers and Medicare recipients are paying trillions of dollars for their injustice.

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Medicare Part D - Joe Scarborough Doesn't Remember "All These Problems"

 Medicare Part D - It's Problems - It's Rollout Similarities to the Affordable Care Act

by Kaiser Family Foundation

It bothered my when Joe Scarborough said he didn't remember "all these problems" with the Prescription Drug Plan bill back when President George W. Bush and the Republicans pushed through what some call the "worst legislation passed since the 1960's. At about 6:20 AM  this morning on his show, Joe Scarborough said "the only thing I remember is that they (the Republicans) held the vote open for 3 weeks and then bribed Nick Smith for his vote. He should use his current health plan to look into what pharmaceuticals are available for a bad memory. I sent an e-mail off to the show immediately, here's a copy of the text:

 

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"First let me say that I love Morning Joe and you all help me start my day, everyday. I've been watching for years and depend on the show to start my day and gather information before I work on my blog www.Medic3569.blogspot.com which I use to inform and motivate people to become well informed and especially to contact Congressmen/women and Senators.

At approximately 6:20 AM Joe Scarborough said he didn't remember "all these problems with Medicare Part D."  What I remember about the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act is that the vote was held open until like 3:00 AM while Republicans twisted arms of other Republicans to vote for the bill. The party threatened Republicans to not back them in their next election if they didn't vote for the bill. I remember that it took away the right to negotiate price (except for the Veterans Administration who was smart enough to stay out of it) and the price Medicare would pay for a common heart went from $280 annually to over $1200 annually.

On December 8, 2003 these provisions of the law passed the Congress by a narrow margin:

• it provides a subsidy for large employers to discourage them from eliminating private prescription coverage to retired workers (a key AARP goal.)
• it prohibits the Federal government from negotiating discounts with drug companies;
• it prevents the government from establishing a formulary , though does not prevent private providers such as HMO's from doing so.

It's the second one I have a problem with, especially since the Republicans and George W. Bush offered no way whatsoever of paying for it!
Later, after the hugh windfall that drug companies enjoyed, I believe it was 60 Minutes who reported, 23-25 of the politicians that co-sponsored the bill had left their jobs in the Congress by either not running for re-election or, in at least one case, just resigned their position, and went to work for pharmaceutical companies at salaries well north of $1M a year.
Joe Scarborough doesn't remember any problems with the bill except for one Congressman that the Republicans were pressuring to change his vote, perhaps he should look into what prescriptions are available for senility."

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Photo by crooksandliars.com

Here are Some of the Problems Medicare Part D had on Rollout

For one thing, the Bush administration faced a difficult political battle to get the bill passed in 2003. I remember they had to hold the vote open until 3:00 AM while they twisted the Republicans arms to vote for the bill. Joe Scarborough said they actually held the vote open for three weeks, I don't know about that.

That damaged public opinion of the law, making it a challenge to educate 43 million seniors on its nuances.

Enrollment in the law was set to begin in late 2005. In April of that year, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 27 percent of respondents understood the law, while only 21 percent favored it. (In a comparable Kaiser poll in April 2013, 35 percent viewed the Affordable Care Act favorably and less than half felt they were well-informed of its details.)

The Medicare site, meant to help seniors pick benefit plans, was supposed to debut Oct. 13, 2005, but it didn’t go live until weeks later in November. Even then, "the tool itself appeared to be in need of fixing," the Washington Post reported at this time.

From PolitiFact - Did Medicare Part D have the same rollout problems as the Obamacare online marketplaces? :

"Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly," the Post reported. (Sensing a pattern?)

Once seniors began to enroll, problems persisted. According to the report, the online tools had "accuracy problems," and local organizations designated with assisting seniors "reported problems getting necessary and accurate information." Call centers provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services underestimated "the needed capacity to ensure that reliable answers could be provided" and "service representatives were not knowledgeable or failed to provide accurate information."

The Georgetown experts anticipated similar hiccups with the Affordable Care Act, noting that the country’s experience with Medicare Part D suggested "the experience will be far from perfect" and "problems were not always addressed as quickly or as thoroughly as critics would have liked, but fixes were usually found."
These days, nine in 10 seniors who utilize the program report they are satisfied with it.
"There’s really a striking amount of similarity even though this time it’s a far larger and daunting task. It’s a fair comparison," said Jack Hoadley at the Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute and one of the authors of the study. "Once something works its way through the problems, you forget the problems."

Approximately twp weeks before the bill passed and the Bush administration was saying the law would cost about $100M, but it was revealed that the plan would cost at least $500M, it turned out to cost much, much, more.

Photo by econbroswer.com

 In a story by Nick Gillespie at Reason.com on November 19, 2013:

         According to the latest actuaries’ report, Medicare Part D will cost taxpayers - beneficiaries pay virtually nothing -    Part D will cost taxpayers — beneficiaries pay virtually nothing — $62 billion this year. This figure is expected to rise sharply in coming years to $150 billion in 2019. By 2030, Part D alone will cost taxpayers 1 percent of GDP. In present value terms, Medicare Part D adds almost $16 trillion to our national indebtedness. (That's how much would need to be in a trust fund today to pay all the benefits that have been promised over and above the trivial premiums paid by beneficiaries.) That is why former U.S. Comptroller David Walker has called the unfunded prescription drug benefit "the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960's."  Read more at Reason.com

Photo by blog.floridablue.com

Where Does The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) Go From Here?

After spending more than $60M on 46 votes to repeal Obamacare the Republicans still have never offered any other plan to help insure the 40 million Americans who didn't have, and couldn't afford health insurance. Mitt Romney, the Republican, who when he was Governor of Massachusetts passed the health law that Obamacare is designed after. They would like to forget how much insurance premiums were rising and that since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law that the rate of increases has been reduced. The Republicans complain about "millions of policies being cancelled" but choose to not respond to where they were when millions of people who paid health insurance premiums for years had their policies cancelled once they became ill. The TeaPublican Republicans have no response about positive things that the Affordable Care Act have done like; allowing children to stay on their parents policies until the age of 26; or that insurance companies now have to spend at least 80% of the money they collect from premiums on the policy holders instead of giving themselves hugh salaries and bonuses; or how 40 million Americans who only had emergency rooms to use as their only access to healthcare, the most expensive way to pay for someone's healthcare will now have healthcare plans and preventive medicine. What  we all need to do is work to fix the problems with The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as they arise and get everyone affordable healthcare.