It's not as if PhRMA just walked in an offered to help. Duplicitous, Chicago-thug as always, Obama was bad-mouthing big pharmaceuticals in public, while pressuring them in private to "play ball," or else.
The Obama administration aggressively pursued the pharmaceutical industry to make a deal in support of health care reform legislation in mid-2009, according to a series of emails released Thursday by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
In particular, pharmaceutical industry executives' correspondence confirmed that White House officials agreed to “kill” efforts on Capitol Hill to allow drugs to be imported from other countries — one of the chief legislative priorities of the industry — to get the industry’s backing.
W.H. pushed hard for PhRMA health reform deal
Right now, the last thing the W.H. wants to have exposed is that what they were telling the public to sell the Bill was not what they were cobbling together to get what they wanted.
In one email exchange obtained by the committee, a pharmaceutical executive said that then-White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had suggested he would publicly call out PhRMA if it didn’t sign to the deal. Another exchange says the White House threatened to use the president’s radio address to call for rebates for prescription drugs in all of Medicare Part D, a proposition the drug industry strongly opposed.
Reimportation of prescription drugs, an issue that the pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly opposed, played a strong role in the negotiations. While the issue has come up for votes on Capitol Hill numerous times over several years and never become law, the industry has always worried that it will.
Nancy-Ann DeParle, who then led the White House Office of Health Reform, said in one email to a pharmaceutical industry executive that she favored the reimportation policy but agreed to stop pursuing it because the industry was being so constructive on health reform.
“I pushed this,” she wrote to a PhRMA lobbyist, “but [Phil Schiliro, Dana Singiser] and I made [the] decision, based on how constructive you guys have been, to oppose importation on this bill.” She was referring to top White House legislative affairs officials.
www.politico.com...
Here's an email where a WH staffer appears to be quite pleased with the "help" they are providing PhRMA in exchange for support:
Courtesy of The Washington Examiner
Details of secret PhRMA deal reveal Obama's hypocrisy
Of course, the Obama campaign is "shocked, I tell you, shocked." Not tht this happened, but that it would come out during the campaign:
White House spokesman Eric Schultz dubbed the investigation “a nakedly political, taxpayer-funded crusade to hurt the president’s reelection campaign.”
“This is the same House committee that has spent, according to one report, over $1 million in taxpayer dollars for the past 15 months looking into baseless allegations on Solyndra — but has done almost nothing to move legislation that would create jobs or grow the economy,” he said.
W.H. pushed hard for PhRMA health reform deal
Who would've guessed?
jw
