July, 13 2022, 11:11am EDT
REPORT: As Senate Democrats Eye Medicare Rx Drug Negotiation Authority, Big Pharma Has Already Spent $147M Lobbying Against Lower Drug Prices During Pandemic While Posting Record Profits
WASHINGTON
Ahead of the U.S. Labor Department's Consumer Price Index report and as Senate Democrats consider giving Medicare authority to negotiate lower prescription prices as part of their reconciliation package, a new analysis from corporate watchdog Accountable.US found PhRMA and the top five drug companies have spent at least $147 million lobbying against lowering drug prices since the start of the pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry known for charging seniors an arm and leg for their medicines is now poised to unleash another major lobbying offensive against the Democratic reconciliation deal, as they did against the sweeping drug pricing proposals in H.R. 3, so they can keep raising prices to absurd degrees without justification.
Additionally, Accountable.US found major drug company CEOs have raked in over $292.6 million in compensation while their companies saw skyrocketing profits - at a time Americans spend an average of $1,200 per person on Rx drugs and as many as 18 million Americans simply cannot afford their prescribed medications.
"Big Pharma, like many other industries, knows they cannot justify raising prices so high at the same time they boast of excessive profits, generous CEO bonuses and huge shareholder payouts. That is why the big drug companies spend so massively lobbying to keep the market rigged in their favor and seniors at their mercy, including many literally choosing between food and medicine. It is time the conservatives in Congress who complain constantly about inflation finally do something constructive about it -- and there's no better place to start than allowing Medicare to finally negotiate lower drug prices. What really matters most to these lawmakers: bringing down costs for seniors, or looking out for the bottom line of their big drug company donors?" --Accountable.US spokesperson Liz Zelnick
Accountable.US previously found Republican lawmakers on the House Energy & Commerce Committee who voted against allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs with drug companies (H.R. 3) have taken nearly $1.7 million in career contributions from industry groups and the five largest pharmaceutical companies opposed to Medicare drug negotiations. The new analysis follows Accountable.US' research over the last several months on how runaway corporate greed from the big oil, meat packing, shipping, retail, clothing, food, trucking and railroad companies has been making inflation challenges much worse for everyday consumers.
Accountable.US is a nonpartisan watchdog that exposes corruption in public life and holds government officials and corporate special interests accountable by bringing their influence and misconduct to light. In doing so, we make way for policies that advance the interests of all Americans, not just the rich and powerful.
LATEST NEWS
'Flawed and Dangerous': US Appeals Panel Upholds Potential TikTok Ban
"This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans' access to information, ideas, and media from abroad."
Dec 06, 2024
First Amendment advocates on Friday criticized a U.S. appellate court for upholding a law that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company does not swiftly sell the social media platform used by an estimated 170 million Americans.
Signed by President Joe Biden in April, the law gives ByteDance until January 19 to divest from TikTok. Three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the parts of the law considered by the panel "do not contravene the First Amendment" nor other parts of the Constitution of the United States.
"The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary's ability to gather data on people in the United States," Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in an opinion the company is expected to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Responding to the decision on social media Friday, Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said that "the D.C. Circuit's decision today to uphold the TikTok ban is enormously disappointing. If allowed to stand, it would give the government far too much power to restrict Americans' speech online."
Jameel Jaffer, who was on a friend-of-the-court brief as director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, issued a similar warning after the ruling was released.
"This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans' access to information, ideas, and media from abroad," he said. "I hope the D.C. Circuit's ruling won't be the last word—and I doubt it will be."
Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project, also looked ahead to the next court fight.
"The D.C. Circuit decision upholding the TikTok ban will immeasurably harm the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in the U.S. and globally who use the app to create, to share information, to get their news, and promote their businesses," she said in a statement. "We hope the next phase of review of this misguided and overbroad law will be a chance to right this wrong and prevent it from going into effect."
In addition to arguing the law is unconstitutional, attorneys for TikTok and ByteDance "have claimed it's impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically,"
The Associated Pressreported. "They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm—the platform's secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan—would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content."
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office one day after the law's divestment deadline, previously supported banning the platform, but during the latest campaign, he pledged to try to "save TikTok." According toThe Washington Post:
Trump is expected to try to halt the TikTok ban, people familiar with his views on the matter told The Washington Post in early November, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department, said Trump could take any of three actions to help TikTok fend off the ban: persuading Congress to repeal the law, directing his new attorney general not to enforce it, and declaring that ByteDance has satisfied the statute by performing a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok.
Although the president-elect hasn't yet weighed in on the new court decision, on Thursday he shared on his Truth Social platform a post-election overview of how his campaign performed on TikTok.
While Trump may move to preserve TikTok in the United States, civil rights attorney and Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo noted that the court decision's "terrible precedent" is also a concern as he returns to office.
"This will be a test of the U.S.'s ability to shut down access to websites they dislike," Caraballo stressed. "Really bad to do with Trump in office! We could enter a new era of government censorship."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Brutal Murder of Insurance CEO Sparks Wave of Dark Humor, Including Fictionalized Denial of Coverage Letter
"You don't have to sanction murder to see why so many Americans detest health insurance corporations who prioritize profit goals by routinely creating arbitrary reasons to deny patient needs," said one labor movement voice.
Dec 06, 2024
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside of a Manhattan hotel Wednesday has sparked a wave of dark humor and fresh fury at the for-profit U.S. healthcare system.
The barbs at UnitedHealthcare—the country's largest private insurer—included a mock denial of coverage letter posted to the subreddit r/nursing in a thread on Thompson’s murder.
"We regret to inform you that your request for coverage has been denied," the letter reads. "Our records indicate that you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest." The Daily Beastreported a spoof rejection letter was also posted to a since closed thread on r/medicine.
Police are in their third day searching for Thompson's killer, who shot the healthcare executive multiple times in front of a Hilton hotel in Midtown before fleeing the scene. The New York Police Department has released an image that shows a man authorities deem "a person of interest wanted for questioning" in connection to the Wednesday killing, perCNN. The image was captured at a hostel in Manhattan, according to CNN, citing law enforcement.
The words "deny," "defend," and "depose" were found written on the ammunition used by the gunman, three words that partially echo the title of the book "Delay, Deny, Defend," which details how the insurance industry avoids paying claims.
In addition to dark humor, reactions to Thompson's assassination have brought to the fore the public's downright rage at the health insurance industry.
In the comment section of Common Dreams' coverage of the murder, one commenter wrote: "I guess if you steal people's labor and deny them healthcare in order to line your own pockets, you might occasionally expect retaliation." Another wrote: "For profit health care is unethical and immoral."
"Thoughts and deductibles to the family," read one comment below a video of the shooting posted by CNN, according to The New York Times. "Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network."
One woman whose mother with stage four breast cancer was forced to battle insurance to get new treatments approved toldNew York magazine that she experienced "a little surge of Schadenfreude," when she heard of Thompson's death.
"UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson was just 50 years old at the time of his murder, which is a lot more tragic when you know that his life expectancy as a member of the Top 1% was 88, or 15 years longer than the life expectancy of the average American male," wrote journalist and editor Moe Tkacik on X. Later, in a piece for The American Prospect, Tkacik framed the situation like this: "Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO."
Others said that the reaction to the murder was an indication that the Democratic party ought to embrace economic populism and end their close association with corporate power.
"The mass reaction to the healthcare CEO’s murder is a reminder that there is a constant deadly class war being waged against working class Americans. If Dems ditched their billionaires and fully joined the side of the working class in that struggle they would easily win FDR style majorities," said the political commentator Krystal Ball.
Charles Idelson, former communications strategist for National Nurses United, said that "you don’t have to sanction murder to see why so many Americans detest health insurance corporations who prioritize profit goals by routinely creating arbitrary reasons to deny patient needs."
"It's not unique to UnitedHealth," he added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Agency Trump and Musk Want to 'Delete' Set to Deliver $1.8 Billion to Scammed US Consumers
"When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is allowed to fully do its job, Americans only stand to benefit."
Dec 06, 2024
In the coming weeks, as President-elect Donald Trump's second term approaches and his pledge to dismantle key agencies potentially comes closer to fruition, 4.3 million consumers are set to receive checks from one of the agencies the incoming administration wants to "delete."
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced Thursday that it will soon begin distributing a historic $1.8 billion to millions of people who were charged illegal junk fees or defrauded by credit repair companies including Lexington Law and CreditRepair.com.
The money will be distributed from the CFPB's victim relief fund, which was created by Congress and is financed entirely by civil penalties paid by companies and individuals who violate consumer financial protection laws.
The fund has distributed $3.3 billion to consumers since its inception, and the CFPB said the forthcoming payment will be its largest ever.
"Lexington Law and CreditRepair.com exploited vulnerable consumers who were trying to rebuild their credit, charging them illegal junk fees for results they hadn't delivered," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. "This historic distribution of $1.8 billion demonstrates the CFPB's commitment to making consumers whole."
A district court ruled in August 2023 that the two companies had violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule's prohibition on advance fees, which bars credit repair firms from collecting fees from consumers until they prove they have achieved the results they promise to their customers.
If the CFPB payments are divided equally among those who were wrongly charged fees by the two companies, each consumer would receive about $419.
The payments are being sent days after the CFPB proposed a rule aimed at reining in data brokers who sell people's personal information.
As Common Dreamsreported, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has expressed concern about the practices of data brokers—but as Trump's nominee to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a yet-to-be-created commission that would cut regulations and government spending, Musk has pledged to "delete" the CFPB.
Filmmaker and media activist Danny Ledonne said Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, another businessman nominated to lead DOGE, likely want to do away with the CFPB because the agency acts "in the interest of regular people."
Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power Program at government watchdog Accountable.US, said the upcoming $1.8 billion payout shows why the CFPB should remain in operation.
"When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is allowed to fully do its job, Americans only stand to benefit," said Zelnick. "Between surprise fees and misleading business practices, today's victory affirms the importance of the CFPB for defending people across the country from shady industry actors."
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said supporters of consumer protections in Congress will "fight any attempts to dismantle [CFPB], whether from Trump, Musk, or their billionaire buddies."
"The CFPB fights for everyday Americans against corporate greed, junk fees, and predatory lenders," he said. "This watchdog agency protects normal people like you and me."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular