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My newspaper column last week was on the Obama administration's hideous flip-flop on the issue of drug importation, and the column and the ongoing reporting here at OpenLeft prompted a very solid story at the top of CNN Tonight's Friday broadcast. Watch it here.
As I said, it's a solid piece* that looks at whether the White House political staff manipulated the FDA and/or doctored an official FDA safety warning in order to protect pharmaceutical profits. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who made the allegation, has since stopped talking, likely under intense pressure from the White House and the drug industry. But we'll try to keep reporting out facts on this, as it's a huge story. Politicizing safety agencies a la Karl Rove is positively outrageous - especially when it's all to protect a price cartel.
The good news is that the furor seems to have exacted a commitment out of the White House for future action:
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Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union," David Axelrod, Obama's top political aide, said the White House still favors drug re-importation and wants to move forward on it.
"Let me be clear. The president supports re-importation. As he said, safe re-importation of drugs into this country. There's no reason why the Americans should pay a premium for pharmaceuticals that people in other countries pay less for," Axelrod said. "We will move forward on it."
Substantively, this is still dishonest - as I noted in past reporting on this, if the administration really wanted to do importation, as Axelrod claims, it has the statutory authority right now to allow it via a certification by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. We're all somehow supposed to ignore that reality - as if we're all idiots. We're all also supposed to ignore Obama's campaign commitment - Axelrod offers up no explanation as to why Senator Obama co-sponsored the Dorgan amendment he worked to kill nor any explanation as to why candidate Obama's campaign promise to support it was broken.
That said, this back-and-forth is a good example of the point that I made yesterday: Namely, that when movements push hard and call out transgressions/corruptions, we at least have the chance to extract future commitments from those in power. If it was up to the Obama administration's whim, they wouldn't want to touch drug importation ever again. We know this because they worked diligently to kill the drug importation amendment last week. But because there was such a firestorm about what they did and how they did it, their top spokesman was forced to go on television and commit to revisiting the issue in the near future.
So while I'm disgusted at this administration for working to protect the drug industry and breaking President Obama's clear campaign promise (which you can see him making in the CNN video), I'm glad there's at least a commitment we can try to hold them to in the coming weeks and months. I'm not saying the commitment has any credibility - after all, the administration has destroyed it's credibility on this issue. But I am saying at least the fight will go on.
* My only real problem with the piece was CNN not making clear that about 40 percent of medicines on the domestic market right now were manufactured overseas - that is, importation is already happening right now, this bill would have just let pharmacists and wholesalers buy those medicines at lower world-market prices. |
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