Obama had strong-armed drug companies into "giving back" $80 billion of their profits by threatening to exclude them from health care reform negotiations. Having "agreed" to this extortion, the drug companies are now seeing the vice tightened even further.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right last week when she called her latest health-care-reform proposal a "his toric moment" [sic]: After decades of life-saving and cost-cutting scientific innovations from drug and medical-device companies, the government is about to step in and stifle the R&D that is our best hope for improving health outcomes.
Pelosi's bill may cost pharmaceutical companies $150 billion over a decade -- nearly double the amount they conceded when they cut a White House-approved deal with Sen. Max Baucus this summer.
The Pelosi bill is a prescription for fewer new life-saving drugs. By stifling innovation, it would hurt not only industry, but also all of us who'd benefit from new-drug development.
But now Pelosi has set up her own "negotiating table" -- nearly doubling the amount Washington would confiscate from the industry and planning vast cuts in what Medicare would pay for drugs -- a provision that the industry was assured was off the other table. Give 'em a hand, they'll take an arm.We hear repeatedly that ObamaCare won't reduce the quality of health care, but that's a difficult pill to swallow when they are siphoning off billions that would be used for R&D to pay for it. Wasn't this monstrosity supposed to save us money?
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