Medicare bill

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The simple answer is that landmark legislation—the medicare bill Part D—was passed by Congress in 2003 to prevent this and to ensure that millions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on drugs. The fact that this bill was passed in the early-morning hours (perhaps so C-SPAN viewers would not be watching), surrounded by hundreds of pharmaceutical lobbyists (who, according to some observers, wrote much of the bill), and that many of the major politicians and staffers who pushed the bill through the legislative process ended up working for the industry is a national disgrace.

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Drug Industry and HMO's Deployed Nearly 1,000 Lobbyists to Push medicare bill. Press Release, 6/23/2004. • Corporate Control of Our Genes. Jonathan King, . • NIH Research Money Spent Per Death, , 6/24/2004. Chapter 17 In the "Bush" Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious convictions. - Blaise Pascal George W. Bush is the President of the United States, and the "buck" stops here; whoops! That was Harry Truman's slogan.

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The new medicare bill held the prospect of the United States going the same way. Holmer, channeling his members' worst nightmares, hated the notion with a passion, and promptly put it in the center of his lobbying campaign. After a lengthy series of bills, amendments, House-Senate conferences, and rewrites, he and his allies, notably the AARP, prevailed. In December 2003, the Medicare Prescription Drug Act became law. In it, governmental price wrangling was not just dropped, it was expressly banned.

To what extent was the medicare bill and pharma's role in it something beyond the normal horse-trading that takes place on a daily basis in the nation's capital? No one really knows; the capital at present is an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney. But John Iglehart, the editor of the influential journal Health Policy and one of the more respected, even-tempered observers of pharma power, detects a clear and troubling thrust.

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This meant the medicare bill, the single largest corporate welfare bill in Congress's history, would almost certainly never have passed if lawmakers had known how much it was really going to cost. Of course, Congress could repeal the act. But lawmakers would need to get it by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican who played a pivotal role in pushing the medicare bill through in the first place. The health care industry has no more ardent supporter in Washington than Frist, a heart surgeon and staunch advocate of free-market medicine. His father, Thomas F. Frist Sr.

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This bill should be repealed, and replaced by a simple measure that guarantees all Medicare beneficiaries appropriate coverage of their drug costs, with government-negotiated payments to industry and a medically based formulary. The medicare bill also stipulated that prescription drugs cannot be imported from Canada without the approval of the Department of Health and Human Services, something that has so far not been forthcoming, although there are some signs that that position may be softening.

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Scully helped craft the final version of the medicare bill, which blocked imports of low-cost drugs from Canada, a top priority of pharmaceutical companies. Also, bowing to the wishes of other industry lobbyists, the act provided billions of dollars in tax subsidies to HMOs, private insurers, and corporations to provide drug coverage. Thus, the congressional supporters of market-driven medicine were giving billions of tax dollars to private business to pretend the market system was functioning.

Ordinarily, that would suggest a conflict of interest, but in the spring of 2003, before the medicare bill negotiations got under way, Scully sought an official waiver from government ethics law from his boss, HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. In an internal decision, Thompson ruled that Scully's job search in the private sector was not "likely to affect the integrity of the services which the government may expect from him." Ten days after the bill was signed, Scully returned to the private sector.

But lawmakers would need to get it by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican who played a pivotal role in pushing the medicare bill through in the first place. The health care industry has no more ardent supporter in Washington than Frist, a heart surgeon and staunch advocate of free-market medicine. His father, Thomas F. Frist Sr., and his brother, Thomas F. Frist Jr., founded what has become HCA Inc., the nation's largest hospital chain with nearly 200 hospitals and revenue of $21.8 billion in 2003.

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At that time, Congress had the new medicare bill on its agenda, and the AMA, which strongly opposed it as "socialized medicine," needed the pharmaceutical manufacturers' support to defeat the bill.) In fact, everything about the Kefauver bill was being lobbied against heavily. It was not considered very likely ever to become a law. While Kefauver was pressing on, the Merrell company had been hounding Frances Kelsey about approving thalidomide. "We had been dickering away with it," she recalled, "and we were sort of chicken. They said, 'We must have it released before flu season.

Medicare bill for the little old lady in San Diego who skipped her heart drug regimen for three days." He also talks about how the holidays contribute to the underappreciated "toxicity from underdosing. We all know about the toxicity of overdosing, but this is different. And with certain diseases, we are creating a Darwinian incubator for drug-resistant organisms." To Urquhart, the luckiest thing for patients is that many drugs are, in his words, "forgiving" of our mistakes. "Sixty percent of patients make errors too small to catch the attention of more forgiving drugs," he said.

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