BUSH PAYS BACK DRUG INDUSTRY BY MISLEADING SENIORS
President Bush has done a lot of favors for those who have given him money, but
few have benefited so handsomely from their financial ties to him than the drug
industry and CEOs like Pfizer's Hank McKinnell - a Bush campaign "Ranger." While
the president said he wants to give "older Americans better choices and more
control over their health care", he is actually refusing to let seniors purchase
lower-priced, FDA-approved medicines from Canada. While a recent poll shows that
two-thirds of Americans support giving seniors this right and while governors
from both parties support the idea, drug companies like Pfizer universally
opposed the idea because it would cut into the billions of dollars in profits
they make each year bilking Americans with high prices. President Bush,
unfortunately, has sided with Pfizer and against seniors, prohibiting seniors
from purchasing lower priced medicines from Canada. Here are the details of the
scam:
THE PAYOFF
President Bush and his Republican allies have taken at least $74 million in hard
and soft money contributions from the drug industry since 2000. That's about
$48,000 per day or $2,033 per hour, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to
President Bush since 2000 - a hefty salary, even for a well-heeled lobbyist. On
one night in 2002 alone, the president and his allies raked in $30 million from
the drug industry, with pharmaceutical companies paying $250,000 "for red-carpet
treatment" by the president just two days after his Capitol Hill allies unveiled
an industry-backed Medicare bill.
The Bush campaign's top individual donors - euphemistically named "Rangers" and
"Pioneers" - are also chock full of drug industry executives. Hank McKinnell,
chairman and CEO of Pfizer, "has pledged to raise $200,000" for the Bush
campaign, while "in-house lobbyists from Bayer Corp, AstraZeneca and Wyeth were
named Pioneers." And the president has not just used traditional channels to
line his campaign's warchest with drug industry cash: in 2001, the president
took $625,000 from the industry to help pay for his lavish inaugural parties.
THE PAYBACK
With states, cities, and individual seniors struggling to pay the skyrocketing
costs of prescription drugs, many have defied federal law and traveled to Canada
to purchase lower-priced medicines. The drug industry, whose ability to keep
prices artificially high in the United States is threatened by reimportation,
has opposed these efforts and enlisted President Bush to kill all legislation to
formally legalize reimportation. Just last year, Congress passed a version of
reimportation, but the president stripped out the provisions from the final
Medicare bill. Recently, when a coalition of bipartisan lawmakers asked to meet
with the president and his health officials on the subject, they refused, and
instead attended "a meeting sponsored by reimportation opponents."
Now, with pressure mounting from seniors and powerful lawmakers like Senator
John McCain (R-AZ), the president has resorted to outright dishonesty in his
fight to keep medicine prices high. Specifically, he is claiming that importing
prescription drugs from Canada is "unsafe" - yet even his own Administration's
health "officials can't name a single American who's been injured or killed by
drugs bought from licensed Canadian pharmacies." As the president's own top FDA
health official admitted, "I can't think of one thing off the top of my head
where somebody died or somebody got put in the hospital because of these
medications. I just don't know if there's anything like that." Professor Paul L.
Doering, one of the nation's leading experts, said the Administration's argument
is "hogwash" as "drugs purchased through the Canadian health care system are
every bit as safe as those available in the United States." He said simply that
the Bush Administration's tactics are "a smokescreen thrown up to conceal
[their] unseemly coziness with the drug industry."
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