11 February 2011
Buying the Pharm
(An uninsured American worker at Willow, circa 2011. Photo Socotra.)
I was chatting with Sabrina and Elisabeth-with-an-S at the Willow bar. It was a quick drive-by stop, mostly just to let the staff know that I had returned from the emergency room at Bethesda still a little dizzy but pretty well assured by the staff that I had not suffered a stroke.
That was not an eventuality that I had considered. I self-diagnosed an inner ear infection of some kind, since something with the same symptoms had been going around the office. The encounter with the organized health-care system, or at least its military wing, left me at least as dizzy as the symptoms that had delivered me there to the ER.
Actually seeing a Doctor was not that hard- pure luck of the draw, since the admitting nurse said that the Monday after the Superbowl had a gigantic turnout of superficial wounds.
The long wait at the pharmacy took the better part of the afternoon. I saw the Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence in mufti, waiting as I was, wasting his active duty time. I can understand why they don’t care about the retired crowd that much. I mean, we have nothing but time, right?
I didn’t mind that much. I finished half of “Griftopia,” Matt Taibbi’s brilliant dissection of the end of America as we knew it.
Willow was quiet. Old Jim is still off on assignment, so the bar was down a quart on curmudgeons.
“You know,” I said to Elisabeth as she poured a beer for a couple of lawyers down the bar, “Jim would have made a great Long John Silver.”
“His heart is in the right place,” she said, brushing a lock of her chestnut hair back oer her ear. “He is a little cranky, but not a real Pirate.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Even the Somali pirates are getting progressive. They are vicious aggressors who take ships on innocent passage and hold their crews for huge ransoms. That Italian ship they hi-jacked this week is just a case in point.” I took a sip of Happy Hour white and determined that it made me neither more nor less dizzy. “But you have to look at them as businessmen, too. They have figured out the way trade is flowing, and how to get their share.”
Elisabeth nodded with distraction, since Jim the evening bartender had not yet arrived to handle the evening surge. I looked at my smart phone to see if anything had happened in Egypt since I left the office. Mubarak had agreed to resign, and then un-resign, and the situation appeared explosive. I shook my head, and thought that the bastards on Wall Street who had squeezed oil and commodities in the Middle East as much as the death grip that Hosni’s thugs had applied to Cairo’s streets over the last thirty years had as much to do with the unrest as anything.
(Somali financiers. Photo Reuters.)
The booming piracy industry is another neat metaphor for our globalized economy. Just about everything you need to know about how money is made and lost is encapsulated in the daily battles between cargo captains and the pirate skiffs in the Somali basin. As any of the pricks in the City of London or Goldman Sachs could tell you, the only trades worth doing are the inside ones. The pirates have learnt that lesson.
It is funny about the mess we are in, not that you would die laughing. That son of a bitch Joe Cassano is the poster child for greed on the financial street, and he had his tea and crumpets on a sliver platter this morning in his fashionable Mayfair flat in London.
Battalions of Smart Guys are still going to work each day in New York, conniving new ways to flush the last cash out of the American financial system.
According to the “breaking news” app on my smart phone, the latest crop of firebrands have arrived on the Hill and have flummoxed their GOP leadership by vowing to find a full $100 billion in spending cuts in the budget. The House Appropriations Committee, now under the Republicans, had settled on a measly $74 billion in cuts, just hours before their version of the Continuing Resolution was supposed to be rolled out.
It is a hoot. The President announced his own version of “painful cuts” to start the news cycle this week. I forget the details, but the total he was willing to put on the table was less than decimal dust in his total submission. Ridiculous, really.
The House is in an uproar, just as if none of them knew that all this political theater is just a distraction from the fact that they are arguing about less than half the budget. The main event is sitting there, sacrosanct. Medicare, Social Security and interest on the debt are now rising through 47 percent of the budget. In nine years, these entitlements are going to eat 64 percent, and by 2030 they will devour a full 70 percent. That does not include defense, of course.
Ridiculous. No, make that criminal, and not the negligent kind. This all happened for a reason.
If you accept that weasel Joe Cassano as one of the architects of our ruination in the financial sector, you have to look across both sides of the aisle in Congress to find the pirates who broke the health care system.
Elisabeth came by and looked speculatively at the tulip glass in front of me. I shook my head. “Billy Tauzin,” I said. “Louisiana Billy should be the poster boy for health care.”
(Former Congressman Billy Tauzin at work. AP Photo.)
“Who is he?” she asked, shaking her pony tale. “And what is that? I don’t have any. Haven’t been to the Dentist since 2005." She flashed her pearly teeth, but I wondered what the Doc will find when someday she can afford a dental plan.
“He is a pirate and a shill for the bastards that are breaking this country, and ensuring that someday, when you get a job that will let you use your law degree, your health care is going to suck.” She smiled at me a little vaguely, being busy and arching only periodically to my rants.
She had to work, so I will turn to you to continue. I fished in my back pocket to find my wallet, and the room lurched a bit and then steadied. I a hoping the drugs that I waited two hours to receive will do something. If they don’t, it is back to waiting in some long lines.
My health care plan, one that Elisabeth and the kids her age cannot afford, may be crappy, but at least I have it.
Billy Tauzin is one of the corrupt bastards that ensured that the fat cats in Big Pharmacy get to keep what they have got, and then gouge us for more. I can’t nominate him as Patient Zero in the health care mess, but I can finger him as a poster boy for corruption, greed and traitorous conduct while ostensibly serving his constituents.
Billy was sent to the Louisiana House the year before I graduated from college. He studied for four terms in that bastion of democracy before winning a special election to the Major League in Washington just as the South was turning Republican. For the next 15 years, Billy was a conservative Democrat and one of the founding members of he Blue Dog Coalition, the linear successors to the reactionary Boll Weevils.
When the Democrats lost control of the House after the 1994 elections, Billy flipped party affiliations and became a newly messianic Republican. The folks back home on the bayou didn’t mind. Billy brought home the bacon, and he was elected to another dozen terms, the first nine of which were unopposed.
Billy’s seniority, honored by his new party, enabled him to serve as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
His legacy is profound and deeply troubling.
His fingerprints are all over the loopholes in the Clean Air Act, the Telecommunications Act (1996), the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and the Cable Act. If none of those trip your memory, I would remind you that the last two were vetoed by the President, but were enacted anyway with super-majorities.
Billy thus is one of the architects of a corrupt system that rewards industry in exchange for campaign contributions. One has to wonder how much cash a candidate has to vacuum up when he is running unopposed, but he does have five kids, and they need shoes.
Anyway, Billy’s big score came in 2003, when the second Bush administration was trying to ram prescription drug reform through Congress. As usual, the original laudable intent of the Act was instantly perverted by the drug companies. Billy got a ton of money from a lobbying group called PhRMA. So did co-conspirators Senators John Breaux and Don Nickles in the senior circuit.
I was in the Department of Health and Human Services at the time, and knew something about how we got drugs at a decent cost to put in the Strategic Pharmaceutical Stockpile: we used the Veterans Administration’s vast network of national buying power to squeeze the industry for the best price.
What Billy and his cronies did was ensure that nothing sensible was going to happen. The key provision of the prescription drug reform was to bar the government from negotiating the price of drugs. The Government was barred from importing drugs from anywhere else. The Congress may as well as drawn a gun on the Executive Branch on behalf of: Abbott, Alexion, Alkermes, Amgen, Arena, Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Biogen, Boehringer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, ….
I could go on, but I have to work this morning.
Billy, Don and John all left their government jobs and became lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, Billy almost immediately after the passage of the act. He is now chief lobbyist for PhRMA, making $2.5 million a year.
I know, I can see you shrug. What do we expect out of our Congress? Set expectations low and live down to them. But it gets better.
See, the House of Representatives has an ethics code. Oh, I know, you have to chuckle. But seriously, there is actually a prohibition against a former Member lobbying on anything "in which the person participated personally and substantially." The ethics restriction is also enshrined in 18 U.S.C. Section 207, "Restrictions on former officers, employees, and elected officials of the executive and legislative branches http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/207.html," if you want to look it up.
Obviously Billy had everything to do with the explicit pandering to Big Pharm. The prohibition is supposed to be a permanent restriction, similar to the one that is ruthlessly applied to former bureaucrats like me, who had some role in Government acquisitions.
As the chief lobbyist for Big Pharm, Billy was the first guy that got a handshake on the Health Care Reform last year. Do you recall the size of the handshake?
Well, we have been throwing a lot of big numbers around lately, but what Billy got was an $80 billion dollar guarantee to buy the Pharm.
It is a pity that we can’t even get to the McCarran–Ferguson Act, 15 U.S.C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stat §§ 1011-1015, which is the private piggy bank of our public money owned by Big Insurance. I guess we can get to that crappy deal for the American public tomorrow.
Laissez les bons temps rouler.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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