It seems to be dawning on our liberal friends that some of the biggest beneficiaries of Obamacare will be…those giant drug companies that liberals love to hate.
Here’s Jonathan Cohn seeing the light in The New Republic:
The industry agreed to embrace health care reform and, later on, launched a massive advertising campaign to promote the cause. In exchange, the White House and Senate Finance–which had been asking various industries to pledge concessions that would help pay for the cost of coverage expansions–promised not to seek more than $80 in reduced payments to drug makers.
To an industry as big and profitable as the drug makers, giving up $80 billion over ten years wouldn’t seem like much of a sacrifice–a point critics started making right away. But…the drug industry wouldn’t even be giving up $80 billion, in any meaningful sense of the term. If anything, it’d be making more money. Maybe quite a lot of it.
That’s because, as Cohn points out:
Health reform, as currently envisioned, wouldn’t merely bring coverage to the uninsured. It would also fill in the “donut hole” in Medicare Part D–the gap in coverage that leaves beneficiaries with serious health problems paying for hundred if not thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket prescription costs.
In addition, because it will take several years to close the donut hole, reform relies on voluntary discounts from the pharmaceutical industry to make drugs more affordable in the intervening years. But those discounts would apply only to name-brand drugs, not generics.
Put it all together, and you have more demand for name-brand drugs.
Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute observes:
But Cohn still supports the president’s health care takeover. Or is it PhRMA’s health care takeover?
Cannon says he predicted all of this months ago. Click here and here to read about how Big Pharma sugarcoated that $80 billion pill.