Sam Stein at HuffPo has been trying to make sense of the back and forth in the supposed deal that the White House and Senate Finance Committee made with PhRMA, and it hasn't been a simple task. Here's his summary of what transpired last week:
Previous White House statements had only fueled speculation that such a deal had been made. Last week, Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, told the New York Times the president had "encouraged" the compact with Big Pharma.
Later in the week, another White House official told the Huffington Post that President Obama wanted to keep Big Pharma's concessions to $80 billion -- and that any measures that would pursue cuts to prescription drug prices, should be considered outside of the health-care overhaul legislation.
When, on Sunday, the lobby group PhRMA pledged to spend $150 million in an ad campaign supporting the president's health care agenda, it appeared to be yet more confirmation of a significant pre-existing arrangement....
On Monday, White House aides called early reports "confused" and "confusing." They acknowledged that they had struck a deal with the pharmaceutical industry on one front, but not the one reported.
The administration, they said, promised that in exchange for the $80 billion commitment it would not push for the inclusion of Medicare rebates as part of health care legislation.
A few hours later, Stein reported that now PhRMA is denying Tauzin's initial claim that there was "a done deal" with the White House on protecting PhRMA in the reform, but:
All of which didn't mean that an arrangement of sorts wasn't implicit in separate discussions. Johnson told the Huffington Post that during negotiations with the Senate Finance Committee PhRMA had made it crystal clear that there were certain provisions it would never support.
"In the beginning, when God created earth, we said we will help pass comprehensive health care reform but we cannot support price controls," he said.
Johnson said that PhRMA negotiated around this understanding with the Senate Finance Committee and its chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, (D-Mont.) and that the White House "blessed" that policy agreement. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has also said the administration supported the deal.
So now it wasn't a White House deal, it was a Baucus deal, they're saying. The only problem there is that, as close as Baucus and Messina are, it's pretty hard to believe that the White House wasn't at some basic level involved here.
The whole mess does one thing, it reinforces the lack of transparency particularly in the Baucus committee negotiations, but also in the White House's involvement in the process. Every other committee's negotiations on the bills were handled in the normal mark-up process, where reporters were in the room and the public could watch them on CSPAN.
The secrecy of the Baucus and White House negotiations is the major problem of this story. And it's not just the public that's been shut out, it's the majority of the Finance Committee. For that reason alone, the Baucus bill shouldn't make it out of committee. And the White House should take the resulting mess as a lesson about the importance of transparency.