Sorry You Drug Me into This?

I’ve written about the underpinnings of our assumptions on the meaning of American democracy. I’ve blogged about those who have restructured, redistricted and are contemplating even greater “representational manipulation” to reduce the weight of urban voters against the power of rural constituents. I decried the “buy the electorate anonymously” misattribution of personhood to corporate structures, effectively giving them a First Amendment-endorsed blank check to influence votes without accountability, set forth in the misguided Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. And I’ve chastised the two tiered regulatory and taxation schema that have allowed the top one percent to control 42% of this nation’s wealth. It all comes down to a nation governed by and for special interests with vague and occasional concessions to its average citizenry. Plutocracy.

I’ve trashed the pharmaceutical industry’s connivance (successful) to ban anything that smacks of competition for their products by eliminating the potential of importation of fairly-priced prescription drugs from places like England, Switzerland or Canada originally proposed under the earlier versions of the Affordable Care Act. Just as the insurance industry elite used their lobbying power to make sure the Act didn’t include any lower-cost government healthcare insurance alternative, and received the bounty of mandatory participation in private insurance at some level, competition is the anti-Christ to these healthcare sectors, even as our per capita healthcare costs are far and away the highest on earth.

Now as the GOP’s hopes have faded for outright repeal of the Act, and even some conservative governors are reluctantly lining up to create state-based healthcare insurance exchanges, the “let’s keep competition out of American healthcare” pharmaceutical industry (in this case the biotech segment) – with smiles, handshakes and campaign contributions in tow – have unleashed their lobbying-clout into the statehouses around the nation. Their goal? “[T]o limit generic competition to their blockbuster drugs, potentially cutting into the billions of dollars in savings on drug costs contemplated in the federal health care overhaul law.

“The complex drugs, made in living cells instead of chemical factories, account for roughly one-quarter of the nation’s $320 billion in spending on drugs, according to IMS Health. And that percentage is growing. They include some of the world’s best-selling drugs, like the rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis drugs Humira and Enbrel and the cancer treatments Herceptin, Avastin and Rituxan. The drugs now cost patients — or their insurers — tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

“Bills have been introduced in at least eight states since the new legislative sessions began this month. Others are pending…  The Virginia House of Delegates already passed one such bill last week, by a 91-to-6 vote… The companies and other proponents say such measures are needed to protect patient safety because the generic versions of biological drugs are not identical to the originals. For that reason, they are usually called biosimilars rather than generics…

“The trench fighting at the state level is the latest phase in a battle over the rules for adding competition to the biotechnology drug market as called for in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010…  A related battle on the federal level is whether biosimilars will have the same generic name as the brand name product. If they did not, pharmacists could not substitute the biosimilar for the original, even if states allowed it.” New York Times, January 28^th.

What is fascinating is how those who claim to favor a free market, one where government regulation is minimized, have espoused rigid governmental interference to protect big biotech firms to avoid facing that free market. Perhaps we are creating a new form of government, embraced by these neocons (haven’t heard that word in a while, eh?!) without conscience: hypocritical plutocracy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what is particularly galling about this hypocritical plutocracy is how wildly successful they have been in having their way with the American people with little real resistance or understanding by the general public of exactly what these giants have accomplished.