Obama Keeps One Promise To the Drug Lobbyists By Breaking Five Promises To The American People

Last night, we witnessed the sad defeat of Dorgan's drug re-importation amendment, which would have saved American consumers billions on their prescription drugs. Allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe was one of Obama's campaign promise on health care. Allowing drug re-importation was instrumental to a variety of campaign promise made by Obama.

Obama promised to stand up to the drug companies. That is a promise Obama has clearly broken--unless he stood up to plant a big fat kiss on Billy Tauzin's cheek after they reached their secret deal.

Remember when Obama repeatedly promised that all the health care negotiations would take place on C-SPAN? That never happened. None of the negotiations have taken place on C-SPAN, and we have no idea what the details are for most of Obama's secret health care lobbyist deals. We only know about the details of his secret deal with PhRMA because the Huffington Post got hold of a memo.

Clearly, cutting secret deals with the powerful industry lobbyists to kill campaign promises is not “changing the way things are done in Washington.” That is exactly how things have been done in Washington lately. Another promise broken

Finally Obama promised to significantly bring down health care costs for regular American families. While drug re-importation alone would not have completely brought down our extremely high health care costs, it would definitely have helped. Nothing in this current Senate bill will ever achieve the promised $2,500 reduction for families.

Drug re-importation is a very popular, bipartisan idea that would actually help “bend the cost curve” on our health care spending, and last night, it died again on the Senate floor. All these promises to the American people were broken to protect Obama's secret sweet heart deal with PhRMA. We know with out a shadow of a doubt where we rank on Obama's list of priorities. Keeping public promises to the American people will always place a distant second to keeping secret deals with lobbyists in Obama's White House.