Sold Cheap

Not so very long ago, the left was screeching about “Big Pharma”, one of their favorite bogyman. Notice how utterly silent they are about trotting that one out right now? Maybe because they have been told to shut up about that since their master has cut a deal with that bogyman.

Oh, and Congressional Democrats, you get left holding the bag on this one.

But the drug industry has also gotten something in return for its support. As reported Thursday in the New York Times, the White House agreed privately not to push for anything beyond the $80 billion in savings that the industry promised over the next 10 years. “The President encouraged this approach,” deputy chief of Staff Jim Messina told the Times. He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”

That puts the White House on the other side from House Democrats, who are trying to subject the drug industry to the kind of direct price negotiations with Medicare that Emanuel once championed. The White House also agreed, sources say, not to get behind a provision in the House bill that would eliminate a good deal that the industry got from another provision in the Medicare prescription drug program. The law shifted six million eligible beneficiaries from Medicaid-which pays lower prices for drugs-to the Medicare drug plan. In the first two years of the program alone, that shift of beneficiaries from one program to the other produced an estimated $3.7 billion “windfall” for the industry, according to a report last year by the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

House Democrats are none too pleased by the White House pact with the drug industry. “We were never part of that deal. We are not bound by that deal,” says Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of three panels that wrote the House bill. “It was not particularly a deal I would have made.”

Whine and screech all you want about people who are really, really not happy with what you are trying to do to this country. Your best buddy in the White House will sell you out in a heartbeat while you get the heat.

Welcome to Omerica. You really might want to consider listening to your constituents rather than to the guy who can’t be trusted with your best interests. Because you will be out of a job if you ignore the former in favor of the latter guy – who has already sold you cheap on this issue.