CT Blue

According to the New York Times, the recent “fiscal cliff” deal was a good deal for drug maker Amgen:

Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the “fiscal cliff” bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs.

The language buried in Section 632 of the law delays a set of Medicare price restraints on a class of drugs that includes Sensipar, a lucrative Amgen pill used by kidney dialysis patients.

The provision gives Amgen an additional two years to sell Sensipar without government controls. The news was so welcome that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts. But it is projected to cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period.

(via NYTimes.com)

Amgen spread its money around in a bi-partisan fashion, particularly to Mitch McConnell and Max Baucus, whose former chiefs of staff now lobby for Amgen. McConnell has a former Amgen employee on his payroll, and both he and Baucus have benefitted from Amgen’s financial largesse, and there seems no doubt that the provision in question was inserted, in noble bi-partisan fashion, by the two Senators, with the White House, also a sometime beneficiary, looking the other way.

My wife, with whom I usually agree, asked how anyone could fail to see this as straight out corruption.

As I say, I usually agree with her, but she’s flat out wrong on this occasion. McConnell and Baucus had only the interests of the patients at heart. The fact that these drugs are currently being overprescribed to the patient’s detriment must, after all, be weighed against the drawbacks of overhasty action:

Supporters of the delay, primarily leaders of the Senate Finance Committee who have long benefited from Amgen’s political largess, said it was necessary to allow regulators to prepare properly for the pricing change.

…

Aides to Mr. Hatch and Mr. Baucus, and a spokeswoman for Amgen, said the delay would give the Medicare system and medical providers the time they needed to accommodate other complicated changes in how federal reimbursements for kidney care were determined.

“Sometimes when you try to do too much and too quickly, you screw up,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Hatch. The goal, an Amgen spokeswoman said in a written statement, is “to ensure that quality of care is not compromised for dialysis patients.”

So true. The evidence is compelling, or at least I’m sure it would be if either McConnell or Baucus had produced any.

Some might say that the two year delay the company got in 2008 (over and above the delay for other drugs), which would have expired in 2014 should have been sufficient, given that the government would have had six years to accommodate the other complicated changes and that a total of eight years to accomplish this task seems unnecessary. They might argue, for instance, that it will take the government more than twice as long to perform this complicated task than it took to win World War II, including developing the atomic bomb, and almost as long as the period of time between our first rocket launch and the day the first man walked on the moon. But that just shows how little such critics know about the relative complexities of the problems involved. Building the a-bomb was a piece of cake compared with figuring out if Sensipar should be treated the same way as every other dialysis drug.

Besides, it’s not like we’re really losing money on Amgen. Sure, this delay will cost us taxpayers $500 million dollars. You read that right, million with an “m”; we’re not even talking billions here. It’s hardly worth thinking about. But consider: Amgen just agreed to pay a $762 million dollar criminal penalty, so that puts us $262 million dollars to the good. Moreover, there’s every reason to believe Amgen will continue to break the law, so it’s overwhelmingly likely the government will hit the jackpot again. Why, we’d be crazy not to give Amgen as much rope as we can.

So I can’t figure out why the Times bothered to waste space on this article. This is the sort of thing that gives the news media a deservedly bad image. We don’t need no education on stuff like this. It’s just not right to imply that hard working public servants like Baucus and McConnell would compromise the public interest for filthy lucre with such overwhelming evidence that they have only our interests at heart.