Fact-esque

What "Democratic Party"? It's the Old GOP vs the Rogue GOP

Got a few stories today that need dot-connecting. They may not seem to have much to do with each other at first but we're going to try to make the relationships visible. It's about how the healthcare "reform" package is showing one of the most important sectors of our society to be not exactly what it seems to be. And not in a good way.

Let's start with the "reform" package itself. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is, as we've been saying all along, a dawg. FDL's Jon Walker counts the ways by contrasting all the plans directly and ranking them from the "perfect" down through the "decent" and" acceptable" to the really really bad". Guess where the Ben Nelson/Joe Lieberman/Blue Dog Senate Plan winds up?

No fair. You guessed.

Dems on Healthcare: "I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday For a Hamburger Today"

That's our Wimpy Dems for yah. Here we got a terrible bill that even Gregg Levine finally agrees ain't worth the trouble it will take to Walk Holy Joe across the street for the filibuster.

You will find no more staunch advocate for helping people when the opportunity is given. I do not believe in destroying the hamlet in order to save it. Philosophical arguments don’t impress when forced to stand next to real suffering. I do not believe the revolution is just a kiss-off away. But if the final health care reform act resembles what I describe above (quite possibly with some not-quite-but-damn-near Stupak language further restricting access to abortion), I say: Kill the bill.

I say this with a heavy heart. Failure to pass health care legislation, even terrible legislation, will be a great loss for the Obama administration and for Democrats in Congress. But passing a bill as bad as the Senate’s eventual endpoint could be a bigger defeat for the Democratic majority we really want—one that takes progressive action on behalf of the voters.

Because, as I see it, a bill without the competitive force of a public option, or the opportunity for millions to buy into Medicare, without cheaper pharmaceuticals or meaningful controls on premiums, without bans on benefit caps or loophole-free safeguards against rescission, but with an individual mandate, will do nothing for the 30 million uninsured that advocates of the bill like to talk about helping—but it will do plenty for the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

This is becoming a bill that nobody except Obama and the conservaDem leadership want, and they only want it so they can say they did it. It doesn't matter a damn to them if it helps any real people or not so long as it doesn't upset the health insurance industry's or Big Pharma's profits, and they can run on it in '12, conning people yet again by bragging that they did something for people that those people haven't figured out quite yet they didn't do. It's a shell game. It's about illusion and imagery and feeding the coffers with corporate donations. It has nothing to do with healthcare, except possibly in Alice's Wonderland.

Cute Corporate Capitalist Cultistry

It's just so adorable the way capitalists and their lackeys manage to think of themselves as brave, risk-taking pioneers, standing alone against the barbarian hordes in the awesomely dangerous jungles of corporate throat-cutting and skinning-alive Big Business behavior when what they really spend their time doing is cutting risk to the minimum and shoving the expense of whatever's left onto someone else. Like taxpayers.

Ben Nelson Protects Medicare Advantage (And Big Pharma)

Prime Blue Dog Ben Nelson, who hasn't made many non-Republican friends lately - or ever - has just sold the New York Times a Bridge to Nowhere, convincing one Robert Pear that, really, Medicare Advantage isn't a huge giveaway to Big Pharma that costs seniors A LOT of $$$ they wouldn't otherwise have to pay for their drug treatments, it's..well, let him tell it in his own inimitable way.

The bill taken up this week by the committee would cut Medicare payments to insurance

companies that care for more than 10 million older Americans, including nearly one million in Florida. The program, known as Medicare Advantage, is popular because it offers extra benefits, including vision and dental care and even, in some cases, membership in health clubs or fitness centers.

Yuh. At 3X normal rates. And of course health clubs and fitness centers are very well known for the massive numbers of senior citizens who go there to work on their abs and get shinier, more healthy quads, running on treadmills and bench-pressing free weights. And since when is there no vision or dental care with Medicare? When did that happen? Or does "extra" mean they pay for rhinestones on the hornrims?

The First Step Toward Killing SocSec?

The "We can't afford it!" crowd of conservatives, Pub and Dem, have apparently won the first round in their War on Social Security. For the first time in 34 years, there will likely be no cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). With inflation currently in negative numbers, that may not sound like much of a hit but there are a couple of things to consider. First, food prices are going up above the inflation level, and energy prices, while lower than last year (the biggest reason the inflation level is considered low), are still pretty goddam high for people on a fixed income and projections are that energy prices won't stay depressed through the winter. Those are two of the biggest three expenses seniors face. The third, of course, is health care, and the biggest chunk of their health care expenses is drugs. Thanks to Medicare Part D, they're going to be paying more out of their pockets for those drugs.

Medicare Part D Cont'd: Obama Re-Ups Bush Giveaway to Big Pharma

I missed this last week but Robert Reich didn't. The Obama Admin has just promised to continue the abortion called Medicare Part D - a Bush program that has proven to be a bonanza for greedy drug makers and a nightmare for seniors who need those drugs - in exchange for their active support on his healthcare reform package.

Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That's basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it's proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included. (We don't know how far the deal extends beyond Medicare because its details haven't been made public.)

Let me remind you: Any bonanza for the drug industry means higher healthcare costs for the rest of us, which is one reason why critics of the emerging healthcare plans, including the Congressional Budget Office, are so worried about their failure to adequately stem future healthcare costs. To be sure, as part of its deal with the White House, Big Pharma apparently has promised to cut future drug costs by $80 billion. But neither the industry nor the White House nor any congressional committee has announced exactly where the $80 billion in savings will show up nor how this portion of the deal will be enforced. In any event, you can bet that the bonanza Big Pharma will reap far exceeds $80 billion. Otherwise, why would it have agreed?

In return, Big Pharma isn't just supporting universal healthcare. It's also spending lots of money on TV and radio advertising in support. Sunday's New York Times reports that Big Pharma has budgeted $150 million for TV ads promoting universal health insurance, starting this August (that's more money than John McCain spent on TV advertising in last year's presidential campaign), after having already spent a bundle through advocacy groups like Healthy Economies Now and Families USA.

(emphasis added)

It's a lousy trade for more reasons than I have the space to explain here, not the least of which is that big drug companies have already reaped $Billions$ from Part D and now stand to reap many $Billions$ more, so $150Mil is, like, a drop in the bucket. It's like promising to replace your neighbor's broken window - the one you just winged a rock through - but only if he'll buy you a Ferrari.

But it isn't so much that this is yet another lousy deal made by Democrats where massive goodies go to corporate sleezebags in return for almost nothing so much as that it is a prime example of business-as-usual in a fascist state: extortion, blackmail, and self-serving lies.

Townhall Rowdies Threaten Unions and Anyone Else Who Favors Public Health Care

Mark at Norwegianity has a post up with a passle of links about Dick's Army and the rest of the Kristalnicht Brownshirt terrorists astroturf town hall disrupters that you really ought to go click through. Big Pharma in particular is using these groups to kill any discussion about your healthcare and healthcare in America and this is how they're doing it:

Since the inevitable comparison is going to made by the Right to the Viet Nam protests of the '60's, I want to make a few comments to clarify the differences, what with the wingnuts saying it's all the same.

Pigs in Space 9: Big Pharma Killed Kids for Profit, Now Wants to Trade $$$ for Innocence

The internet system at the Savannah libraries has been down since Friday. Today we get back online and I'm trolling my newsletters to find out what I missed over the weekend and I run into a little piece in the WaPo that tells me if the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow, they do occasionally at least rip the right perp on behalf of its victims.

Thirteen years ago, Pfizer decided it wanted to test a drug that was supposed to cure meningitis. The Clinton FDA, however, wouldn't approve the trials because they didn't meet govt standards (those icky, awful regulations that conservatives have been running against for a quarter century and spent the entire Bush Admin dismantling). Pfizer knew perfectly well from preliminary tests that if it tried to meet those govt standards the drug would fail since there were significant problems with it.

It could have dropped the drug. It could have continued research and tried to find solutions for the problems. It was a dangerous drug but its potential for massive profits was great and Pfizer didn't want to lose time raking in the moolah so it did neither of those things.

Just how far is Big Pharma prepared to go to squeeze money from dangerous drugs? This far: they "arranged" for trials in Nigeria, used kids illegally, killing some of them, faked the data, and then sold the drug on the world market until a number of deaths forced several govts to outlaw it.

Drug $$$: Avastin v Lucentis

Big Pharma has become infamous for its disinterest in affordable drugs. It wants to develop only the high end, expensive drugs it can charge an arm and a leg for, and then complain bitterly about the "abusive medical costs" brought about, no doubt, by excessive govt regulation. They want to tell us they "can't help it", that developing drugs is time-consuming and expensive and they have to charge high prices to stay in business.

We know that's almost never true, at least not to the degree that they claim it, but a drug company called Genentech is allowing us a little peek into how Big Pharma thinks, and guess what? It's all about the $$$$.

What does a company do when there's anecdotal evidence that two of its drugs are equally effective in treating a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, one costing patients $60 per treatment and the other $2,000?

In the case of Genentech Inc., nothing.

The company declined to seek federal approval for the cheaper drug, Avastin, to treat the wet form of age-related macular degeneration. Nor would it help finance — or cooperate with — a National Eye Institute study comparing the effectiveness and safety of Avastin, a cancer drug, and the more expensive eye drug, Lucentis.

The financial stakes stemming from the study are huge. Medicare officials estimate there could be 50,000 or more additional cases of macular degeneration a year. Treating just one year's worth of new patients with Lucentis would cost $1.2 billion a year, compared with $60 million if they're treated with Avastin, Medicare officials said.

Drug Database Promises End to Medical Privacy

The age of the internet has always had within it the seeds of corporate abuse of privacy and, not surprising, the first of the industries to take full advantage of what it offers are health insurance and life insurance corpo's. There is a new data "tool" that willo make it quick, easy, and cheap for insurance companies to disallow a potential client for "pre-existing conditions" or other excuses.

Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

Collecting and analyzing personal health information in commercial databases is a fledgling industry, but one poised to take off as the nation enters the age of electronic medical records. While lawmakers debate how best to oversee the shift to computerized records, some insurers have already begun testing systems that tap into not only prescription drug information, but also data about patients held by clinical and pathological laboratories.

Traditionally, insurance companies have judged an applicant's risk by gathering medical records from physicians' offices. But the new tools offer the advantage of being "electronic, fast and cheap," said Mark Franzen, managing director of Milliman IntelliScript, which provides consumers' personal drug profiles to insurers.

(emphasis added)

They do what for a living??