Former politician-extraordinaire Billy Tauzin, now the head of PhRMA, has played the occasional stenographers at The Wall Street Journal at a perfect-pitch, tonight. He is a dark prince, afterall.
Mr. Tauzin has used a relatively-innocuous press interview about a White House meeting held today (with various captains of pharma, including Merck CEO Clark) to drive a wedge between two wings of the Administration — one still favoring legislation to allow reimportation of genuine, branded FDA-approved prescription drugs — from Canada and elsewhere, and the other no longer favoring the idea. In this way, Mr. Tauzin hopes to force President Obama’s hand — effectively causing the President to back away from his campaign rhetoric in favor of reimportation, and consequently, cheaper prescription drugs, for United States consumers. Take a look at what The Journal ran, tonight:
. . . .As a presidential candidate, President Barack Obama endorsed re-importation, an idea the [pharma] industry opposes. White House officials have told the industry if the larger health care bill passes, the cost savings will be so great that reimportation will be unnecessary, according to Billy Tauzin, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
Mr. Tauzin said major pharmaceutical chief executives attended the Tuesday meeting. . . .[but it] wasn’t clear who attended from the White House side. A White House official confirmed the meeting took place but didn’t have immediate comment on what was discussed. . . .
So — as a master-puncturer of political “trial balloons” in this arena (reimportation, and the subsequent reduction of pharma’s take), for over a decade, Mr. Tauzin has goaded Democrats, and independents, in Congress — to voice their opposition to the idea of dropping reimportation initiatives to Rahm Emanuel, tonight — and thus divide the energies, and distract the Nation, from the central object lesson, here.
Mr. Tauzin’s clients’ goods (prescription drugs, by any measure) are simply artificially-overpriced, in the United States marketplace. And yet, Mr. Tauzin calculates, we will spin our wheels, talking about whether Mr. Obama is a “flip-flopper“, or “kow-towing” to industry-special-interests — rather than asking this very sensible core question, of Mr. Tauzin’s clients — in pharma:
“Why do many of Schering-Plough’s pills cost 40 to 180 percent more, in the United States — for the exact same prescription-drug (manufactured in the same plants, by the same workers — often even from the same batch-lot numbers, but ultimately-exported to Canada), than they do, when purchased in Canada?“
That, my dear readers, is a central question to be addressed by any effective stab at United States health care delivery reform.
