According to a report by Duff Wilson in the Sunday New York Times, Much of PhRMA’s $150 million in advertising will be spent pushing Senator Baucus’s version of the health “reform” legislation.
Up to now, the group, led by former Representative Billy Tauzin, a Republican from Louisiana, has contributed $12 million toward an advertising campaign coordinated by a coalition called Americans for Stable Quality Care. Early advertisements focused on general subjects like “Eight Ways Reform Matters to You.”
But an industry official involved in the discussions said the group and its advertising money would now be aimed specifically at the approach being pushed by Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
I’m a bit surprised that PhRMA is allowed to back a particular version of the bill over others offered by different democrats, and still expect the White House to protect it on parallel trade and price negotiations for Medicare.
I was quoted in the story, as follows:
The group’s advertising spending has been criticized by people who say drug makers should be forced to make deeper concessions than they have agreed to with Mr. Obama and Mr. Baucus.
James Love, director of the liberal nonprofit research group Knowledge Ecology International, is one of those critics. “Essentially what the U.S. got was not $80 billion,” he said, “but $150 million in Obama campaign contributions.”
If I knew what Duff Wilson knew, I might have expressed this a bit differently. One wanders who really “owns” this health reform bill? Is it President Obama, or Senator Baucus? And how minimalist is the Obama vision of “reform”?