COMMENTARY: The upside-down economics of health care reform

(RNS) We’ve watched Congress debate, position, and confuse the nation with various proposals for national health care reform. What we haven’t seen is lawmakers focusing on lobbyists and drug companies. It’s time to connect some dots. Let’s start with a few facts at the outset: 1. I think most people agree that access to quality […]

(RNS) We’ve watched Congress debate, position, and confuse the nation with various proposals for national health care reform. What we haven’t seen is lawmakers focusing on lobbyists and drug companies.

It’s time to connect some dots. Let’s start with a few facts at the outset:

1. I think most people agree that access to quality affordable health care is a right.


2. Drug company lobbyists, including Genentech and its Swiss parent company Roche, are so enmeshed on Capitol Hill that they managed to get 42 members of Congress to use their prepared talking points, The New York Times reported recently.

3. Drug companies have raised prices by about $10 billion, according to The Times, after promising to drop them by $8 billion once new health care reform regulation sets in.

4. The U.S. Catholic bishops have a stake and a voice in all this, both individually and as a group.

The essential health care question — should everyone have access to “affordable health care?” — has generated a corporate stampede toward the government money trough. Drug companies want government plans that pay for their treatments. More health coverage means more customers. More customers mean more profits.

And for the drug companies, that means more obscene profits.

I’m all for what’s good about the free market and capitalism, but there is something funny going on between Congress and the health care industry. Raising prices of wildly popular drugs and treatments prior to sealing the deal with the government to cut prices erases the promised savings.

Genentech lobbyists have succeeded in getting government officials to say warm and fuzzy things about government-funded biotechnology efforts. Thanks to Genentech lobbyists, three Republican congressmen actually said the same thing: “I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosililar products is one area of the (health care) bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options.”


Lower costs for whom? Did I mention that Genentech’s parent company, Roche, makes Boniva, an osteoporosis drug that’s now 18.6 percent more expensive than last year? Many other drugs advancing in the profit conga line are aimed at the Medicare set as well, again according to The Times: Takeda’s Actose, for diabetes (up 16.5 percent), Amgen’s Enbrel for arthritis (up 12.1 percent), Bristol-Meyers Squibb’s anticoagulant Plavix (up 8.2 percent), and Pfizer’s Lipitor for high cholesterol (up 5 percent).

These are real issues. The bottom line is that the so-called “public option” for health insurance, which appears to be a good thing, will grant bloated profits to drug companies while also freeing funds for abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other measures that can have creepy results, if not creepy intents. (What, for example, do we do with the thousands of excess frozen embryos from in vitro fertilization procedures?)

Some of the drug companies that have the most to gain — like Roche — are all for embryonic stem cell research, even as Roche’s Genentech subsidiary says embryonic stem cell work is not its thing. Yet Genentech’s biotech lobbyists certainly have had their way with the Congress.

The bishops want to help the disenfranchised and the poor, without directing taxpayer dollars toward treatments that destroy or devalue human life. Some pooh-pooh the church’s stance as “single issue.” Well, yes, it is. The single issue is life. That includes abortion, embryonic stem cells, and in vitro fertilization.

Unfortunately, no one is hearing what the Catholic bishops have to say. Their moral capital evaporated with the sex abuse scandal, and will not return until each bishop who covered up the scandal is no longer functioning. That includes some high-profile embarrassments whose presence among the collected bishops sends the creep-o-meter spinning.

With or without the bishops, all Catholics have the right to complain in the public forum about all this. As Chicago’s archbishop, Cardinal Francis George said recently, “Issues that are moral questions before they become political remain moral questions when they become political.”


Unfortunately, with or without the moral debate, expanded healthcare access may end up resulting in some kind of taxpayer costs. And the brunt of those costs will be borne by the people who can’t afford it, not the drug companies that can.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

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