The announcement last week that Pfizer was willing to supply a year of drugs to those who'd recently lost their jobs (provided they could show prescriptions for treatment) had the media in a tizzy about the prospect of free Viagra, one of Pfizer's many products. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the wittiest piece on this, with the newspaper's "Doc Gurley" calling her article "Jobless-But-Erect Seeks Same."
Gurley quickly cut through the PR stunt to identify the underlying economic reasons the corporate giant was taking such "humanitarian" steps. The downturn wasn't one of them. "Just the threat of healthcare reform has industry promising to stop excluding the sick, to stop discriminating against women, and to hand over 2 trillion dollars to Obama." Her article concluded amusingly, "What do you think the healthcare industry will offer us next to step away from healthcare reform? First-born children of sales reps? An hour alone with Mehmet Oz?"
While that last one may be a pleasing fantasy to many, Pfizer's move comes at a time when the president is pressing strongly for healthcare reform to offset the country's spiraling debt. The two factors—healthcare costs and national debt—are clearly interrelated. So as Paul Krugman at the New York Times wisely observed about the apparent willingness of The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and other lobbyists to play along with the president's plan, "There's every reason to be cynical about their motives. Remember that what the rest of us call healthcare costs, they call income."
Some of us remember a few other reasons to keep the champagne on ice: Just a few months before W.J. "Billy" Tauzin was appointed president of PhRMA, he was (conflict of interest anyone?) one of the principal authors of the Medicare prescription drug bill. That bill, according to the Washington Post, "included several provisions ... to vastly expand the market for prescription drugs among the elderly. In addition to adding hundreds of billions of dollars for drug benefits, the law barred the federal government from directly bargaining down the price of drugs, a provision PhRMA pressed for." Before he jumped ship to represent Big Pharma, Tauzin was in short the architect of a bill that locked the government (and thus the taxpayer) into paying top dollar for drugs when far-cheaper generics were available elsewhere, including Canada.
Which brings us to another, almost surreal wrinkle in the story—one I wrote about in my book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. In the fall of 2005, the New York Daily News and Los Angeles Times uncovered, "The rich and powerful pharmaceutical lobby secretly commissioned a thriller novel whose aim was to scare the living daylights out of folks who might want to buy cheap drugs from Canada."
You almost couldn't make this stuff up, yet it happened. Sometime in 2003, PhRMA approached Michael Viner, publisher of Los Angeles-based Phoenix Books (a specialist in tabloid publishing), and offered "a six-figure sum for the marketing and production of a written-to-order fictional thriller." Tongue firmly in cheek, the Los Angeles Times explained that "the plotline was what Hollywood would term high-concept—a group of shadowy terrorists conspires to murder thousands of Americans by poisoning the medicine they're importing from Canada to beat U.S. drug prices. (Think True Lies meets the Physicians Desk Reference.)"
"They said they wanted it somewhat dumbed down for women," explains Kenin Spivak, one of the authors, "with a lot more fluff in it, and more about the wife of the head Croatian terrorist, who is a former Miss Mexico." They also wanted "to change the motivating factor of the terrorists to greed, because they didn't want it to be politics," he adds. Finally, "lots of people [had] to die."
The authors insist that a PhRMA marketing executive "sedulously monitored the work by phone, e-mail and in person, often ordering changes in plot, characterization and tone."
All of which makes the prospect of free Viagra for the unemployed look like a bid to distract us from the past and current practices of PhRMA—to keep lower-cost generics off the table when the time comes for healthcare reform.
I hope the Obama administration sees through such obvious smoke and mirrors, to target a key reason our healthcare premiums are so high in the first place: PhRMA went to extraordinary lengths to enshrine those costs in law, making it all-but-impossible for the government to reduce them.
When you consider how urgently we need healthcare reform in this country, and how our new friends at PhRMA have blocked such reforms in the recent past, the fantasy of even an hour alone with Mehmet Oz seems just a shade less important.
Christopher Lane, the Pearce Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University, is the author most recently of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.
