How Tom Carper’s Positions and Votes Screw People and Help Rethugs Screw People. Volume 4

When Tom Carper and Big Pharma join together in an unholy match made in financial heaven, guess who loses?  If you guessed ‘everybody else’, you know your Tom Carper.

Let’s first look at the terms of this unholiest of marriages.  In exchange for being perhaps Big Pharma’s most dependable stooge (Sen. Menendez of New Jersey is also in the running), Tom Carper has received compensation from the industry commensurate with his stoogery.  Big Pharma has contributed $225,010 to Tom Carper from 2011 to the present (end of year contributions not yet reported).  Of that amount, $194,410 came from PACs as opposed to $30,600 from individual donors. 86.4% of all dollars from the industry in PAC dollars.  Open Secrets has it all right here.  If you look at Carper’s 20 Top Contributors, the following all have significant involvement in Pharma:  Astra Zeneca, Ashland, Pfizer,  and DuPont. In addition, the following big donors have holdings in, and/or are lobbyists for, the pharmaceutical industry (relevant links provided):  Blackstone Group, Akin, Gump, et al, Skadden Arps, et al, and King and Spalding.

So, what exactly did/does Big Pharma get from Tom Carper?  A lot.  Carper’s obstructionism on behalf of the industry paid off handsomely during Obamacare negotiations. And, yes, people who rely on government insurance programs bore the cost. The negotiations were tilted towards the industry even before Carper put his stamp on them.  This entire article is a must-read, I’ll try to do a decent cut-and-paste:

In the 2008 campaign, Obama declared his intention to include all stakeholders as he sought to reform the nation’s health care system, but also supported key Democratic health reform policies. Among these were several that targeted the pharmaceutical industry: Allowing re-importation of drugs from first world countries with lower drug prices and providing Medicare with negotiating authority over prescription drug prices in the recently enacted Part D program. These weren’t just promises, Obama had already voted for both of them as a senator in 2007. (Roll Call Vote 132 and Roll Call Vote 150.)

Because of Obama’s decision to develop a plan operating through the legislative process, members of Congress also played key roles. Early on, the pharmaceutical companies were told to deal directly with Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Baucus would be the vehicle for the deal worked out behind the scenes by the White House and PhRMA.

Central to this effort was PhRMA president, CEO and top lobbyist Billy Tauzin, a longtime Democratic member of Congress who switched party affiliations after Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994. By switching parties Tauzin was able to maintain his influence and even rose to be Chairman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. Tauzin became the poster child of Washington’s mercenary culture. He crafted a bill to provide prescription drug access to Medicare recipients, one that provided major concessions to the pharmaceutical industry. Medicare would not be able to negotiate for lower prescription drug costs and reimportation of drugs from first world countries would not be allowed. A few months after the bill passed, Tauzin announced that he was retiring from Congress and would be taking a job helming PhRMA for a salary of $2 million.

Aiding PhRMA in their outreach to Congress would be a squadron of lobbyists to push their health care reform priorities. The total number of lobbyists working for PhRMA in 2009 reached 165. Some 137 of those 165 lobbyists representing PhRMA were former employees of either the legislative or executive branches. Of these dozens were former congressional staffers including two former chiefs of staff to Max Baucus.

The negotiations between the White House, Tauzin, Baucus and others resulted in a deal that eliminated much of what the industry sought to eliminate:

These included drug reimportation, Medicare negotiating power and speedier release of generics to the market. According to previous analysis of the measures proposed by the committee, these measures would have totaled hundreds of billions in cost cuts, far exceeding the $80 billion cap agreed to by the White House, Baucus and PhRMA.

I’m gonna cut the rest of the chronology, which you can read in the article, and fast-forward to Tom Carper:

The key amendment targeting the PhRMA deal in committee mark-up came from Sen. Bill Nelson from Florida, which has one of the largest Medicare participant populations in the nation. The pull of constituent needs clearly put Bill Nelson into a position to push for further cost cutting in Medicare prescription drug pricing. His target: closing the “donut hole” completely.

Nelson claimed that his amendment would generate $106 billion in revenue, or from PhRMA’s perspective increase their cost-cutting to $186 billion.  That would be unacceptable to PhRMA, to Baucus, to the White House and to the pharmaceutical industry who had made the deal. Other Senate Democrats, Tom Carper and Robert Menendez voted with Republicans and Baucus on the committee to defeat the amendment.  It is little surprise the Carper’s Delaware is home to AstraZeneca and Menendez’ New Jersey is home to Merck and Bristol-Myers-Squibb, all of which lobbied for the $80 billion cap.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced the final bill, with the cap in place, on November 19. Debate began on Dec. 3, and with it come one more attempt by members to change the terms of the deal. Senator Byron Dorgan introduced an amendment that would allow for drug re-importation, but as the date for voting drew near, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) released a letter objecting to the proposal that echoed pharmaceutical industry talking points: “…as currently written, the resulting structure would be logistically challenging to implement and resource intensive. In addition, there are significant safety concerns.” Dorgan’s amendment was defeated with numerous Democrats previously in support of reimportation switching to “no” votes.

Speaking about the Dorgan Amendment:

An anticipated vote on Dorgan’s amendment was initially blocked on Thursday by Democratic Sen. Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, home to the U.S. headquarters of pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Carper backs a different version of the legislation that supporters decry as a poison pill.

Carper said in a statement that he shares the FDA’s concerns that “Senator Dorgan’s amendment could potentially allow unsafe, counterfeited drugs into the United States, contaminating our drug supply. This is a complicated issue that affects people’s lives. We should make sure that the FDA says it’s safe before we reimport drugs from other countries.”

McCain complained about the role of PhRMA, saying the powerful group “has been over here lobbying furiously” because the amendment “breaks the agreement that the White House made.”

Nobody likes an angry screed more than I do.  And I like this one from 2012 more than most:

Right, Senator Carper and the FDA are worried about unsafe counterfeit drugs coming into the US, that’s why they won’t let American citizens buy the same drugs, made and sold by the same pharmaceutical companies, for a quarter of the price in Europe.

Contrary to Senator Carper’s assertion, it’s actually not that complicated.  You see, Senator Carper has received $166,300 from pharmaceutical lobbyists, and a whopping $320,210 from insurance lobbyists. That’s nearly half a million dollars in bribes appreciation from lobbyists who have zero interest in making your health care affordable and every interest in gouging you for every penny you’ve got.

Carper has received $27,200 alone from AstraZeneca.  You know AstraZeneca, they’re the pharmaceutical company that charges Americans nearly four times what it charges Europeans for one of the world’s most popular asthma drugs, Symbicort.

For their money, Big Pharma bought a senator who voted against drug importation, voted against closing the Medicare donut hole, voted against Medicare negotiating power,  and voted against speeding generics to the marketplace. And voted against many of you.

Big Pharma won and earned incalculable profits.  Consumers lost and paid the price.  Money well spent.  Next time the great man wants to shake hands with you, show him a copy of your medical expenses.  He’s a key reason why they’re so high. And, if you’ve got asthma, some well-placed sputum might also be in order.