Drug Lobby Second to None
Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical company, grossed $51 billion in sales,  netting over $11 billion in profit! Once the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit goes into effect next year, drug makers will receive billions more in increased profits.

The cost of prescription drugs are so far out of reach, it's a wonder anyone is able to utilize them. Case in point, just one of my arthritis drugs costs approximately $4,000 a month! Who on earth can afford that? Fortunately for me, I was chosen to participate in the Medicare Drug Replacement Program which provides this drug to me for only $5. But I am one in only 30,000 people in the nation who was chosen to participate. I believe you must be falling apart at the seams in order to qualify for such a program. Many of the "state of the art" drugs most often recommended for treatment were denied me simply because the costs were so out of reach. Consequently, 12 years of debilitation ensued with little hope for improvement. How do you put a dollar amount on a person's quality of life? How MORAL is that?

How The Pharmaceutical Industry gets its way in Washington

By M. Asif Ismail

WASHINGTON DC — The pharmaceutical and health products industry has spent more than $800 million in federal lobbying and campaign donations at the federal and state levels in the past seven years, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. Its lobbying operation, on which it reports spending more than $675 million, is the biggest in the nation. No other industry has spent more money to sway public policy in that period. Its combined political outlays on lobbying and campaign contributions is topped only by the insurance industry.

The drug industry's huge investments in Washington — though meager compared to the profits they make — have paid off handsomely, resulting in a series of favorable laws on Capitol Hill and tens of billions of dollars in additional profits. They have also fended off measures aimed at containing prices, like allowing importation of medicines from countries that cap prescription drug prices, which would have dented their profit margins. Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, made a profit of $11.3 billion last year, out of sales of $51 billion.

The industry's multi-faceted influence campaign has also led to a more industry-friendly regulatory policy at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that approves its products for sale and most directly oversees drug makers. 

Most of the industry's political spending paid for federal lobbying. Medicine makers hired about 3,000 lobbyists, more than a third of them former federal officials, to advance their interests before the House, the Senate, the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other executive branch offices.

In 2003 alone, the industry spent nearly $116 million lobbying the government. That was the year that Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which created a taxpayer-funded prescription drug benefit for senior citizens.

That figure was not anomalous. In 2004, drug makers upped their reported expenditures on lobbyists to $123 million, a record amount for the industry. Of the 1,291 lobbyists who were listed that year as representing pharmaceutical corporations and their trade groups, some 52 percent were former federal officials.

By adding the benefit to Medicare, the government program that provides health insurance to some 41 million people, the industry found a reliable purchaser for its products. Thanks to a provision in the law for which the industry lobbied, government programs like Medicare are barred from negotiating with companies for lower prices.

Critics charge that the prescription drug benefit will transfer wealth from taxpayers, who provide the funding for Medicare, to pharmaceutical firms. According to a study done in October 2003 by Boston University professors Alan Sager and Deborah Socolar, 61 percent of Medicare money spent on prescription drugs will become profit for drug companies. Drug-makers will receive $139 billion in increased profits over eight years, the study predicts. The Medicare prescription drug benefit starts in 2006.

(To read the entire article, click here.)