What is it about Big Pharma that enamors the Biden administration?
Is it that the major drug companies donate heavily to leftist causes?
They donated nearly $6 million to President Joe Biden’s campaign — four times what they provided to President Trump — and, according to the American Accountability Foundation, they’ve given hundreds of thousands to the Democratic Governors Association, Democratic Attorney Generals Associations, and other similar Democratic-connected groups on the state level.
Is it that they support leftist interest groups, like unions, pro-amnesty groups, and abortion advocacy organizations?
Whatever the reason for this unholy alliance is, it’s costing the American people dearly.
This problem has gotten especially pronounced over the last week.
Rather than return to work after July Fourth weekend recharged with firecracker energy to help low and middle-income Americans deal with this record spout of inflation, the Biden administration came back with a plan of putting a ticking time bomb on their ability to obtain affordable drugs.
On Monday, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, led by radical socialist Lina Khan, issued a troubling report that PhRMA, the trade association that represents all the major drugmakers, quickly endorsed after spending millions of lobbying dollars on this very issue.
This endorsement wasn’t exactly surprising. Khan’s report can only be described as a blueprint for new punitive regulations on one of the only allies that American consumers and businesses have to challenge Big Pharma’s stranglehold over the marketplace.
Those allies, called pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), are the groups that health plans contract with to challenge Big Pharma at the negotiating table and secure better pricing deals for the American people.
The billions of dollars PBMs save the country every year aren’t exactly a secret. Research from Casey Mulligan, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Donald J. Trump, shows they save us hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The government has similarly found that they clip our prescription drug spending tremendously. In 2019, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found they offset Medicare Part D spending by a full 20 percent. Last year, the Department of Labor’s Inspector General even concluded the department would have saved $300 million if it used PBMs. But, this week, the Biden administration argued the opposite in its report.
Here's the thing, though: one Republican FTC commissioner, who voted no on releasing this report, believes that the commission came to this determination without providing any concrete evidence.
Translation: the Biden administration is going to war against PBMs and to bat for Big Pharma just because it wants to, facts be damned.
Commendably, following the report’s release, that Republican commissioner issued a public dissenting statement in which she wrote that “the Report was plagued by process irregularities and concerns over the substance—or lack thereof—of the original order.” She went on to write that “the politicized nature of the process appears to have led to the departure of at least one senior leader at the Commission.”
The millions of dollars of Big Pharma campaign cash that the Biden administration has benefited from, coupled with the fact that this pro-Big Pharma, anti-American consumer report does not seem to be backed by any concrete data (heck, it even contradicts the FTC’s own previous findings), raises the question: is Biden going after affordable drugs just to please a political paymaster?
If so, that’s a rather bold move to make, especially now, in the heat of the 2024 election.
Polling consistently indicates that healthcare affordability is a top campaign issue for voters — and the polls also show that the president’s favorability numbers have hit rock bottom. One would think that the president and his staff would be stopping at nothing to get those favorables back up over the next few months. But I guess the worst swamp creatures can’t stop themselves from playing in the D.C. mud.
Corey Lewandowski, a Republican strategist, served as the 2016 campaign manager for President Donald J. Trump