Happy Days Are Not (Quite) Here Again: The Battle Over Drug Prices

In case you have any illusions that the knuckleheads in Washington got the Message last Tuesday night, consider their new pr campaign against the Democrats' plan to negotiate cheaper Medicare drug prices. The Bush administration sent out emissaries Sunday to threaten a presidential veto if it passes. There was Dan Bartlett on Fox News, and HHS secretary Michael Levitt in the New York Times, wringing their hands over the horror of doing the people's bidding, rather than big Pharma's:

"I don't believe I can do a better job than an efficient market," Leavitt told the New York Times. He went on to extol the virtues of the "magic of the market."

The magic of the market has many seniors packing a low-sodium lunch, piling into buses for Canada or Mexico, and buying their drugs at a third of the price they pay here. (Would the 700 mile fence at the Mexican border stop them from defying the "magic of the marketplace"? Just wondering.

Or maybe Leavitt meant to say, the magic of the drug lobby, which sent an army of nearly a thousand lobbyists, and spent more than 100 million dollars, to make sure the Medicare drug bill protected their interests.

We can only continue to point out, loudly, that the vast majority of the American people, including 70 percent of Republicans want the government to negotiate lower drug prices. Bush has nothing to lose in 2008, but his party sure does. Do Republicans really want to run on a record of protecting the drug industry's profits at the expense of your Grandma?

You'd think not--yet there are the spokesmen, days after their "thumping," threatening to veto a centerpiece of the Democrats' agenda.

Happy progressives out there, take note--as Ken Adelman should have put it, this isn't going to be a cakewalk.

Shelley Lewis is author of Naked Republicans, a Full Frontal Exposure of Right-wing Hypocrisy and Greed.