More Selling Out to PhRMA

[Guest guest]

http://www.davidsirota.com/2004/08/more-selling-out-to-phrma.html

 

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

 

More Selling Out to PhRMA

 

You may have heard about the Australian Free Trade

deal the Bush administration just signed - it was a

massive giveaway to the drug industry which funds the

Bush campaign. Specifically, the Bush administration

used the deal to force the Australian government to

raise the price of medicine there. The trade pact also

included provisions to impede future legislative

efforts permitting seniors to reimport cheaper

prescription drugs from Australia.

 

Now, just months later, news reports reveal that the

top Bush administration trade officials who negotiated

the deal are going to work for the health care and

drug industries. Specifically, the Sydney Morning

Herald reports Ralph Ives, assistant US trade

representative for pharmaceutical policy, next month

" becomes vice-president for global strategy at

AdvaMed, " a medical products industry group. Simiarly,

Claude Burcky, who was Ives's head negotiator on the

Australia deal, " is now director of global government

affairs at the pharmaceutical company Abbott

Laboratories. " Not surprisingly, Abbott has already

started to exploit the industry-backed patent

provisions in the trade deal.

 

This is, of course, nothing new for the Bush

administration. The White House has extremely close

ties to the drug industry and allows it to continue

charging Americans the highest prices for medicines in

the world. For instance, Bush Medicare administrator

Tom Scully immediately departed to become a health

industry lobbyist after he made sure the new Medicare

bill was a massive giveaway to the industries he was

going to work for. The move raised still unanswered

questions about whether Scully was actually

negotiating the new lobbying job while still working

on the Medicare bill.

 

Similarly, the White House has appointed key

pharmaceutical industry figures to top positions that

regulate that industry. For instance, Bush appointed

Eli Lilly executive Mitch Daniels as his budget

director from 2001-2003, " even though Daniels had no

full-time job experience related to the federal

budget. " During Daniel's tenure, the White House took

the extraordinary step of attaching provisions

protecting Eli Lilly from lawsuits to the bill

creating the Department of Homeland Security.

 

Bush also hired Daniel Troy as chief counsel for the

FDA, despite the fact that he represented Pfizer as a

lawyer. Under Troy's leadership, FDA is intervening in

court to block liability lawsuits against drug makers.

 

Even the international AIDS fund is not immune to the

Bush-pharmaceutical industry nexis. Bush nominated

Ex-Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias to manage the

international fund. Under Tobias, U.S. funds to fight

AIDS are only allowed to buy brand-name drugs from the

major pharmaceutical companies. The decision

effectively shuts out cheaper generic medicines that

could be provided immediately to the developing world.

 

posted by David Sirota @ 10:24 AM