Mark Dayton: A good deal for seniors

by Mark Dayton, Pioneer Press

August 17, 2009

Public pressure may be forcing the Obama administration to back off its deal allowing drug companies to continue ripping off billions of Medicare dollars at senior citizens’ and taxpayers’ expense.

It began in 2003, when Congress expanded Medicare to provide prescription drug coverage for seniors. At the last minute, behind closed doors, the conference committee added a new provision, not previously considered by either the House or the Senate. It prohibited Medicare’s administrators from negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. Instead, Medicare was required to pay whatever prices seniors were charged for their medicines by the various insurance plans.

Being forbidden from negotiating lower prices and thus saving money is so nonsensical that it’s hard to find a comparable example in the real world. So, I’ll have to make one up. Suppose a law were passed that, since this newspaper publishes opinion columns, it must accept mine and pay me $2,000 for it. No negotiation allowed.

That is obviously absurd. Unfortunately, in Washington, absurd practices benefiting powerful special interests far too often become laws. And since Medicare pays for all or part of two-thirds of all prescriptions nationwide, this absurdity costs senior citizens and taxpayers an additional $85 billion every year.

When the Obama administration sought political support and cost-saving concessions from the drug companies, their principal lobbyist proposed a deal. The pharmaceutical industry would promise to find $80 billion in “savings” over the next 10 years to help pay for the president’s health care reform and would support it if he would protect its existing Medicare gravy train.

Unbelievably, a top presidential aide reportedly agreed to that deal, supposedly as a necessary price for overall health care reform.

That agreement reveals the awful truth I saw too often in Washington deal-making: the best interests of the American people come last. The first hogs at the huge health care trough are the insurance and drug companies. Their profiteering is the number one reason that good health care is unaffordable for increasing numbers of Americans. Yet they have the political and financial power in Washington to defeat change that is against their interests, even if that change would benefit the American people.

To their credit, three committees in the U.S. House of Representatives recently stripped the drug companies of their Medicare price protection, which would reduce the prices senior citizens pay for their medicines and lower the program’s costs to American taxpayers.

Their actions, which were clearly in the American people’s best interests, prompted the drug industry’s dash to the White House to negotiate its “deal,” which would have required President Obama to reverse his campaign promise.

Since the deal was reported, public outcries and objections from principled members of Congress have apparently forced the White House to renounce it.

Now is the time to keep that pressure on, by contacting either the White House or members of Congress. Tell them: “No deals” with drug companies.

Any new health care law must include what most of them promised during their campaigns: allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, which would lead to lower prices for all of us.

That would be a very good deal.

Mark Dayton is a Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2007. He is a candidate for governor of Minnesota in 2010.

Mark Dayton: A good deal for seniors