Robert Reich, one of the most reliably progressive Democratic voices, has just put up a blog post decrying the recently announced deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry.
In order to buy the industry's support for its healthcare reform policies, the Obama administration has pledged that whatever reform emerges will "bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices." This is, as Reich points out, the same deal that the Bush Administration struck over the Medicare drug benefit. And it basically assures that one of the main forms of cost cutting that healthcare reform could bring won't happen.
But as Reich points out, the deal is not only bad for all of us. It's bad for democracy.
Reich appreciates that the Obama administration has gotten Big Pharma on the side of reform, as he remembers how the pharmaceutical industry helped kill off reform when he was in the Clinton administration. But he questions the cost of the deal:
It's bad enough when industry lobbyists extract concessions from members of Congress, which happens all the time. But when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry's support to a key piece of legislation, we're in big trouble. That's called extortion: An industry is using its capacity to threaten or prevent legislation as a means of altering that legislation for its own benefit. And it's doing so at the highest reaches of our government, in the office of the President.
When the industry support comes with an industry-sponsored ad campaign in favor of that legislation, the threat to democracy is even greater. Citizens end up paying for advertisements designed to persuade them that the legislation is in their interest. In this case, those payments come in the form of drug prices that will be higher than otherwise, stretching years into the future.
My take: like Rahm Emanuel's recent outburst, the Obama administration's pharmaceutical deal reminds us that progressives need to keep our eyes on the prize. The goal is to produce the best healthcare reform that we can. And that doesn't mean we'll always be on the same side as the administration, which often has notably different priorities.