Big Pharma Profiteers getting Help From Joe Biden

President Joe Biden’s top media buying business is assisting Big Pharma in its efforts to destroy his party’s watered-down drug price legislation by focusing on Senate Democrats who are up for reelection this year. It’s just the latest example of how money trumps idealism for the Beltway consultant class. While Big Pharma congressional supporters have already succeeded in thwarting the Democrats’ drug pricing plan.

The provision in Biden’s Build Back Better legislation remains the party’s most earnest attempt to implement its long-standing commitment to empower Medicare to negotiate lower prescription prices. One of the most popular provisions in the Biden social agenda plan is allowing the government to negotiate prescription pricing, as most other high-income countries do.

Despite this, Canal Partners Media, a key Democratic Party media buying agency, is running commercials for drug industry front groups seeking to prevent Democrats from cutting medication prices as promised in the Biden reconciliation agreement. One group claims that Democrats are endangering people with rare diseases, and it is naming and shaming many Democratic senators. According to the other, Democrats are jeopardising drug corporations’ ability to respond to pandemics like as COVID-19.

The fact that the federal government regularly subsidises drug firms’ research and development costs and has spent tens of billions of dollars to finance COVID vaccines and treatments is conveniently ignored by these fearmongering marketing campaigns. While one of the group’s advertisements claims that they are unconcerned about corporate profits, this is precisely what these campaigns are about. To secure the pharmaceutical industry’s enormous profits, the pharmaceutical industry wants to ensure that Americans continue to pay significantly more for drugs than consumers in any other country. And they’re getting support from Democratic political consultants.