Grovel-Gate: Democrats Politely Beg PhRMA For Extra $10 Billion

If you ever wonder if large corporate interest groups have too much power in Washington, here is your answer:

Congressional leaders are asking the pharmaceutical industry to cough up an additional $10 billion to help pay for the healthcare overhaul as they search for revenue to fund what will likely be a more expensive final bill than the one the Senate produced last month.

A decision on whether to help could come as early as the end of this week.

Sources said healthcare industries are being asked to endure deeper cuts as lawmakers scrounge for additional revenue.

This is just sickening. The United States pays dramatically more for prescription drugs, compared to the rest of the world. As a country, we overpay by tens of billions of dollars for brand name drugs every year. Partly this is because Congress banned Medicare from directly negotiating for prescription drugs.

Another major problem is that we don't allow cheaper drug re-importation from Canada or Europe. The CBO says this would save American consumers roughly $100 billion over the next decade, but Obama made sure drug re-importation failed in the Senate to protect his secret deal with PhRMA.

Real health care reform would reduce our spending on prescriptions by hundreds of billions over the next decade. The drug companies have effectively been robbing us blind for years and Obama promised them he would make sure this health care reform bill would do nothing to stop that.

Now the members of Congress have been reduced to politely begging the drug companies for a little bit more money. . . if they don't mind. It is disgusting. Congress should never grovel before any industry for scraps. They should be implementing real reform, reform that would save the federal government and the American people hundreds of billions by ending the bad drug company practices that have been used for years to rip us off.