Surprise! The healthcare lobby has sock puppets in the US Congress. Ace reporter from New York Times thinks he’s onto a big story uncovering it, but fails to get half the story and the half he does get is incomplete. The sock puppetry is a defensive reaction to excellent independent reporting.
As American citizens, we have two options to regain control of our representative democracy: Draft our representatives and take our chances, just like we do with jury duty. Because no one would know who the draftees were before hand, there’d be no opportunity for before-the-fact lobbying; the lobbyist industry would wither and die in one cycle. Either draft them. or adopt some sort of penalty box for our elected officials. Get caught in a lie, or with your hand in the till, or shilling for one of your contributors, or with your dick where it doesn’t belong and bam, just like that, you sit out a few voting rounds. If the penalty is bad enough, you’re ejected—from that game or the season.
Take the 42 members of the US House of Representatives—22 Republicans and 20 Democrats—that parroted a script from a Genentech lobbyist directly into the Congressional Record. That would be a game-ending penalty. No more votes from these rubes for the duration of the healthcare reform debate. Robert Pear, reporting for the New York Times, calls it “an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.” Before too long we’d be down to three or four principled individuals debating the merits of, well, the principles of the issue.
Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-New Jersey) told Pear that he regretted “the language was the same. I didn’t know it was.” Pascrell said he “got his statement from his staff and ‘did not know where they got the information from.’” First, it wasn’t information; it was a script. Second, that you didn’t know where it came from is despicable, rising to the level of ejection.
There were, of course, political contributions involved. And what does Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office have to say to Pear about the situation? “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.” No, of course not.
The Genentech-scripted statement was deceptively benign at first glance. Endorsing a healthcare reform provision that “would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs, along the lines favored by brand-name companies like Genentech,” writes Pear. Except that’s not the whole story.
Jane Hamsher, of Firedoglake.com, has the other half of the story. In late October, Hamsher published an article about the Genentech-backed provision that would grant biosimilar drugs a 12-year monopoly. That’s right, instead of “approving generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs,” the Genentech-backed provision, introduced by Representatives Anna Eshoo (D-California) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), would actually keep generics out of the market. Hamsher reports that an “evergreening” clause in the provision “grants drug companies a continued monopoly if they make slight changes to the drug (like creating a once-a-day dose where the original project was three times per day), they will never become generics.” Genentech is located in Eschoo’s district.
Representatives Henry Waxman (D-California) and Nathan Deal (R-Georgia) offered a much more reasonable biologic five-year patent protection amendment, but US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) chose the Eshoo-Barton measure in the final bill.
Hamsher reported the position taken by Genentech and other drug manufacturers—namely, that the cost of developing biologics is so expensive they need extra patent time to recoup their investment—is disproven by their own research. A big-pharma study by Joe DiMasi and Hank Grabowski “concluded that the cost for developing biologics is $1.3 billion, as opposed to $1.2 billion for conventional drugs,” according to Hamsher. Besides, as Hamsher points out, US taxpayers have already paid for the development of many of these drugs.
Oh, and just so you don’t think Jane Hamsher doesn’t have any skin in this game, she’s a three-time breast cancer survivor. It would appear Genentech’s ham-handedly jamming its script to God knows how many members of the US House of Representatives—and getting 42 of them to oblige—is really a damage-control reaction to Jane Hamsher’s original reporting calling out Eshoo for her ejection-worthy penalty on behalf of Genentech and the rest of big pharma.
If Robert Pear and the New York Times were really serious about the gravity of this issue they would immediately:
- Publish the complete list of names of the House members parroting their big pharma masters.
- Publish the complete raft of emails, in complete context; it’s probably not surprising that members of the US Congress can be bought, but some of us would like to know how low the price is.
- Publish the complete transcripts of the purchased members’ floor comments along with their “revisions and extensions.
Until then, they’re little more than part of the problem.
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