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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17219

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: news

Taylor L
US health 'spent more than any group ever' on lobbying in 2009
Pharma Times 2010 Feb 16
http://www.pharmatimes.com/WorldNews/article.aspx?id=17391


Full text:

In 2009, spending on US federal lobbying by the pharmaceutical and health products industry reached “the greatest amount ever spent on lobbying efforts by a single industry for one year,” says a new survey.

The industry spent $267.8 million on federal lobbying during the year, which is also more than any other business, industry or special interest area spent during the period, says the study, from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

Despite the economic downturn, 2009 proved to be “a year of riches unlike any other” for US federal lobbyists, whose clients spending’ for the year reached an all-time high of $3.47 billion, 3% up on the $3.3 billion recorded for 2008 – the previous all-time high, says the CRP. In last year’s fourth quarter, expenditures were up nearly 16% over fourth-quarter 2008, reaching a record $955.1 million.

Overall, the “health” sector – in which the Center also includes specialist areas such as health professionals and services – spent $544 million on lobbying last year, an increase of nearly 12% on 2008’s total and second only to the “general business” sector, which includes a range of industries from retail sales to manufacturing to business associations, where spending grew nearly 19% to a record $558.2 million.

The “general business” sector also employed more registered federal lobbyists last year than any other sector, at 3,513, with the health sector a close sector with 3,405, far ahead of the next group – finance/insurance/real estate with 2,654. However, each of these sectors employed marginally fewer registered lobbyists in 2009 than they did the year before, notes the CRP.

“Lobbying appears recession-proof,” comments Sheila Krumholz, the Center’s executive director. “Even when companies are scaling back other operations, many view lobbying as a critical tool in protecting their future interests, particularly when Congress is preparing to take action on issues that could seriously affect their bottom lines,” she notes.

Such issues of course include health reform, and the “months and months” of congressional health reform debates last year pushed up the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying spending by nearly 11% year-on-year, while that for health services and health maintenance organizations (HMOs) grew more than 14%. Moreover, expenditures by “miscellaneous” health industries soared more than 43% between 2008 and 2009, and the prolonged health reform debate was also partly responsible for the big increases in spending by industries and associations which are not typically associated with health care issues, says the Center.

The biggest-spending individual lobbying client last year was the US Chamber of Commerce, at $144.5 million, but the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) was in third place on $26.1 million and Pfizer was fifth with $24.6 million.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909