Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16261

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Wang SS.
GOP Leader to Drug Industry: You Made a Deal with a Bully
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Aug 18
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/08/18/gop-leader-to-drug-industry-you-made-a-deal-with-a-bully/

Full text:

House Republican leader John Boehner yesterday hurled some choice words at Billy Tauzin , the former congressman who heads the big drug industry trade group PhRMA.

We’ll let Boehner’s letter to Tauzin speak for itself. Here’s how it starts:

Appeasement rarely works as a conflict resolution strategy. This is as true in the arena of policymaking as it is in schoolyards across America. When a bully asks for your lunch money, you may have no choice but to fork it over. But cutting a deal with the bully is a different story, particularly if the “deal” means helping him steal others’ money as the price of protecting your own.

(The entire letter is posted on NPR’s health blog.)

Boehner goes on to call the $80 billion deal PhRMA struck with the Obama administration “short-sighted” and one that comes at the cost of its customers and employees. Americans, Boehner asserts, want health care form that “lowers costs and increases choice – not government-run health care that increases costs and limits options,” and PhRMA ought to listen to its customers and members. Two wrongs – the Obama administration’s approach to health reform and PhRMA’s deal – don’t make a right, Boehner writes.

Ken Johnson, senior vice president at PhRMA, gave the Associated Press this response to Boehner’s letter: “We have been working diligently for more than a year to advance bipartisan health care reform. We’re proud of those efforts, and they are completely consistent with our core principals.”