Life vs. Profits

 

To get the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) passed in 2010, even a Democrat-controlled Congress required a whole lot of compromises and concessions to the profit-driven private sector. Private insurance companies pushed aside a potential government-supplied, ultra-low-cost competitor, and the pharmaceutical industry – pretending to be concerned about lax quality control (in Canada and Europe???) of non-US prescription drugs – managed to relegate approved prescription drugs to those sold in the United States (where the same drugs are sold at prices vastly higher than those found overseas).

There’s no question that developing new pharmaceuticals is expensive and risky, but large foreign pharmas (particularly in Europe) seem to be able to ply their trade, develop extraordinary new treatments and cures, but retain their rather substantial cost advantages nonetheless. But as long as American pharmas can get Congress to protect their rather extraordinary pricing practices, why should they change? And if a little lobbying and campaign support is required, it is a small price to pay for the profitable result.

Yet our pharmaceutical sector is terrified that a popular uprising, a sudden focus by US consumers on how much more they are paying for their prescriptions than almost anyone in any other developed country, could bring national attention to these expensive practices. You can see this sensitivity by looking at how the stock market reacted recently when a Congressional inquiry drilled down on a new potential cure for the often fatal Hepatitis C. A 12-week curative course would cost a patient a whopping $84,000. But is that a fair or excessive price for such a dramatic treatment?

“A new drug to treat hepatitis C that costs $1,000 a pill has caused rising concern among insurers and state Medicaid programs. It has now also spurred interest from Democratic congressmen whose queries about the drug prompted a sell-off in biotechnology stocks on Friday.

 “Three Democratic members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have demanded that Gilead Sciences, the developer, justify the price of its drug, which is called Sovaldi… ‘Our concern is that a treatment will not cure patients if they cannot afford it,’ the congressmen said in their letter, which was sent on [March 20th].

“Gilead’s stock fell 4.6 percent, to $72.07 on [March 21st]. Nervous investors took down the shares of some other big biotechnology companies as well, worried that pressure on drug prices would increase. Biogen Idec and Alexion Pharmaceuticals both fell 8 percent, Vertex Pharmaceuticals 5 percent and Celgene nearly 4 percent… ‘The fear that Congress may begin a program of meddling, one drug at a time, doesn’t affect just one drug,’ said Andrew A. Bogan of Bogan Associates, which invests in science and technology stocks. ‘It kind of scares everyone.” New York Times, March 21st.

Sorry, but such an investigation doesn’t really scare me. Yet there have always been forces on both sides of the aisle – beneficiaries of pharma’s political support – who are being pressed into an uncomfortable corner. GOP conservatives, arguing a jingoistic “buy American” in a free market, are going to have to make their stand under the harsh reality of truth: it’s not a free market if Americans are denied access to most of it!

Medical costs are continuing to rise, because it appears that preserving private profits has a much higher national priority than containing healthcare costs or saving lives. And since there is little or no hope of getting reform through a House of Representatives that has tried 54 times to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act but truly has no interest in supporting the obvious required fixes to a statute they just hate, what exactly do we expect will change?

Every other piece of seminal legislation (from Social Security and Medicare to the entire federal tax code) has passed through a process of continuing legislative refinement to correct unanticipated flaws and unforeseen and undesirable results. Not so the Affordable Care Act. Our American right wing wants the Act to look bad, to fail, and doing what Congress has done on every other social legislation at this level through our history, fixing the law through amendment, is simply not on the table this time. This law appears to be the basis of the big battle expected in the upcoming mid-term elections. And the GOP wants that bill to look bad, without the slightest concern of what is really best for America. Why are polarization and gridlock the new badges of honor in our Congress these days?

I’m Peter Dekom, and are we, as Americans, ever going to have a nation where most of us are on the same page?