Inside Big Pharma's Republican cash grab

Congressional Republicans are enthusiastically doubling down on the corruption openings five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave them when they legalized political bribery with Citizens United. Their newest scam is trying to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

A new study this year by the RAND Corporation found that Americans pay 4.22 times more for brand-name drugs than the citizens of any other developed country. That’s a 422% markup against the (already profitable) prices people in other countries pay for the same drugs, with the entire burden borne by citizens of the US, directly or indirectly.

And that price-gouging has been on hyperdrive since the Bush administration got legislation passed in 2003 that forbade Medicare from negotiating drug prices like the Pentagon, big hospital chains, and drug store chains do routinely: Between that year and 2020, retail prescription drug spending exploded by 91 percent in the US.

Their lies to Congress aside, drug companies aren’t using that money to develop new products; every genuinely new drug developed in the US over the past decade was funded by our government. Instead, the senior executives in the industry are using those profits they extracted from you and me to buy new corporate jets, luxury yachts, and palatial mansions all around the world.

For example, AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez reportedly earned around $60 million annually in recent years, with total compensation from 2013 to 2018 reaching approximately $334 million. Nice work if you can get it.

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Similarly, Johnson & Johnson returned $17 billion to shareholders and executives with stock buybacks in 2022; an amount that more than exceeded their total investment in R&D.

Nonetheless, when Axios reported on how Republican Congressman Buddy Carter (R-GA) and Republican Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Mike Crapo (R-ID), and John Cornyn (R-TX) are enthusiastic about ending Medicare’s ability to simply negotiate prices like any other major purchaser, they opened their story with the dubious line that those Republicans were concerned about our “heavy-handed government squelching pharmaceutical innovation.”

What those Republicans are actually concerned about is the continuing flow of cash into their campaign accounts from the profits Big Pharma and other monopolistic industries squeeze out of so many of us. Not to mention all the fancy trips, junkets, “tips” now authorized by the Supreme Court, hookers, and other forms of political support that we used to call bribery.

As with so many other policies, from abortion to education to the climate emergency, Republicans don’t give a damn what their voters or the larger American citizenry want. Fully 77 percent of Republican voters want Medicare to negotiate drug prices, for example, but these sleazy, bought-off politicians have learned that they can reliably send their voters off on a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy by simply throwing a few racist tropes at them and they — and the media — will quickly forget all about drug prices and other terrible corporate behavior.

When Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in Citizens United after taking millions in bribes…er, tips…from rightwing billionaires with business before the Court, he was merely reflecting the position the GOP has held since the Reagan administration embraced corruption as a way of life.

That began, you’ll remember, with the Reagan campaign cutting a deal to hold the Iranian hostages to screw Jimmy Carter in 1980. Totally transactional.

Now it’s barely news when Republicans sell out America’s voters for the proverbial bag of silver.

They take literally billions in cash and support from the fossil fuel industry and its billionaires while denying climate change or hustling scams like carbon capture.

Their presidential candidate made over a billion dollars while in office, much of it by forcing our government officials to pay inflated prices to his properties.

His son-in-law sucking up to a billionaire dictator while in the White House resulted in him walking away with $2 billion.

Instead of investigating these staggering levels of corruption, Republicans congratulate the Trump family grifters and want in on the scam. And America’s rightwing billionaires — skeptical about democracy but enthusiastic about oligarchy — are more than happy to oblige them.

From the Texas power grid to Florida’s private school voucher program to Georgia’s vote vigilantes, the GOP is committed to remaking America in the image of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where billionaires own every aspect of the nation’s business and, in turn, make ordinary politicians into multimillionaires.

When President Biden tried to reduce student loan debt, Republican politicians rushed to Trump-appointed judges to block his efforts.

When Congress tried to clean up our CO2 pollution to mitigate climate change, Republicans on the Supreme Court gifted the fossil fuel industry by gutting the EPAs ability to regulate their pollution.

And now that Medicare is finally, in a very small way, negotiating drug prices and thus already saving Americans billions, these same Republicans are falling all over themselves to end that ability.

America is suffering from a corruption crisis that’s almost never mentioned in our media. In large part that’s because it’s mostly Republicans who are on the take, and when that gets pointed out they charge media outlets with “partisan bias.”

And in the case of Big Pharma, it’s also because that industry hands billions every year in ad revenue to our TV industry. America is the only industrialized country in the world that allows pharmaceutical advertising on television (New Zealand does, too), but when the American Medical Association called on Congress to ban these ads back in 2015, the GOP laughed at them.

It’s beyond time to put an end to the GOP’s corrupt gravy train. The damage Republicans on the Supreme Court have done to our country by embracing and then legalizing corruption as a way of life is inestimable.

Cleaning it up must be a first priority when/if Democrats can recover control of the federal government this fall, and pointing it out should be part of every Democratic candidate’s advertising...

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