[0:03]If you've ever wondered why the cost of prescription drugs in the United States are the highest in the world, or why it's illegal to import cheaper drugs from Canada or Mexico. You need look no further than the pharmaceutical lobby and its influence in Washington, D.C. According to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity, congressmen are outnumbered two to one by lobbyists for an industry that spends roughly $100 million a year in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses to protect its profits. And one reason those profits have exceeded Wall Street's expectations is the Medicare prescription drug bill. It was passed three and a half years ago, but its effects are still reverberating through the halls of Congress, providing a window into how the lobby works. Mr. Speaker, I request a recorded vote. The unorthodox roll call on one of the most expensive bills ever placed before the House of Representatives began in the middle of the night. Long after most people in Washington had switched off C-span and gone to sleep. The only witnesses were congressional staffers, hundreds of lobbyists and U.S. Representatives like Dan Burden of Illinois and Walter Jones of North Carolina. The pharmaceutical lobbyist wrote the bill. The bill was over 1,000 pages and it got to the members of the house that morning and we voted for it about 3:00 a.m. in the morning. Why did the vote finally take place at 3:00 o'clock in the morning? Well, I think a lot of the shenanigans that were going on that night they didn't want on national television in primetime. The house will be in order. The house. The house will be in order. Steve, I've been in politics for 22 years and it was the ugliest night I have ever seen in 22 years. The legislation was the cornerstone of the Republican's domestic agenda and would extend limited prescription drug coverage under Medicare to 41 million Americans, including 13 million who had never been covered before. At an estimated cost of just under $400 billion over 10 years. It was the largest entitlement program in more than 40 years and the debate broke down along party lines. This is a 15-minute vote. But when it came time to vote, the Republican leadership discovered that a number of key Republican congressmen had defected and joined the Democrats. arguing that the bill was too expensive and a sell out to the drug companies. Dan Burton and Walter Jones were among them. They're supposed to have 15 minutes to leave the voting machine open and it was open for almost three hours.
[2:45]The house will be in order. Mr. Speaker, I move reconsideration. I didn't Thanks to your arm twisting. It was horrible. I mean, we had a good friend from Michigan, uh, Nick Smith and they even threatened to, uh, uh to work against his son who wanted to run for his seat when he retired. I saw a woman, a member of the house, a lady crying when they came around her trying to get her to change her votes. Uh, it was, it was ugly. On this vote, the A's are 220 and the A's are 215. The conference work is agreed to. When the prescription drug bill finally passed, shortly before dawn in the longest roll call in the history of the House of Representatives. Much of the credit went to former Congressman Billy Tozan of Louisiana, who steered the bill through the house. No, it's just a messy process. I mean, the old adage about if you like sausage or or laws you should not watch either one of them being made is true. It's a messy process. The voting machines were open for 3 hours. Why? Because the vote wasn't finished. You didn't have the votes. No, it wasn't finished. And arms were still being twisted. Right? People were being talked to. Walter Jones said it was the ugliest night he had ever seen in politics in 22 years. Well, he's a young member. Um, had he been around for 25 years he had seen some uglier nights. But it certainly wasn't ugly for the drug lobby, which invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election. and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office. Former Senators Dennis D'Anci and Steve Sims and former congressmen like Tom Downey, Vic Fazio, Bill Paxson and former House minority leader Robert Michael, all registered as lobbyists for the drug industry and worked on the prescription drug bill. I can tell you that when the bill passed, there are better than a thousand pharmaceutical lobbyists working on this. Democratic Congressman John Dingle of Michigan has been in Congress for 52 years and is the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which oversees Medicare. He says the bill would not have passed without the efforts of the drug lobby. There's probably a lot of truth in it that the bill was stacked in their benefit and it's probably also true that it was written by their lobbyists. You can even walk to the steps of the capital without having somebody at maybe one or two coming up to you and say, can't you change your vote? Can't you vote for this bill? Any other members wish to change their votes? Why was the drug lobby so interested in this bill and what did it have to gain? Ron Pollock, the executive director of Families USA, a non-partisan healthcare watchdog group, says it all boiled down to a key provision in the legislation. It prohibited Medicare and the federal government from using its vast purchasing power to negotiate lower prices directly from the drug companies. What was the main focus of the the lobbying effort? Well, the key goal was to make sure there'd be no interference in the drug companies' ability to charge high prices and to continue to increase those prices. And whose idea was that? There's no question that this was prompted by the pharmaceutical lobby. The drug industry says that competition among private insurance plans that service the Medicare program help keep prices low. But families USA reported in a January study that Medicare patients are being charged nearly 60% more for the top 20 drugs than veterans pay under a program run by the Veterans Administration. For Lipitor, a popular cholesterol drug, the cheapest Medicare price is $785.40 for a year's supply. 50% more than the VA's price of $520.49. For Zocor, another cholesterol drug, the best Medicare price is $1,485.96 for a year's supply. The same drug only costs $127 a year under the VA plan. And this is because the VA negotiates with the drug companies on price. That's correct. The VA does bargain and they do it successfully. Medicare could do the same thing, but Medicare is prohibited from doing that as a result of this new Medicare legislation. What was the logic or what was the idea or the rationale behind not giving the government the ability to negotiate drug prices? Simply that the drug companies didn't want it. They wanted to make as much money as possible, and if there's negotiation like there is in in other countries around the world, then they're going to have their profit margin reduced. Before the vote, Congress was told the program would cost a whopping $395 billion over the first 10 years. In fact, Medicare officials already knew it was going to cost a lot more. Within two weeks after the bill was passed, everybody knew it was going to cost well over $500 billion. Many members of the Congress that voted for it said, I would never have voted for it had I known that. They misled us. Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster later told Congress that he revised the cost estimate to $534 billion before the vote, but was told to withhold the numbers from Congress if he wanted to keep his job. And to instruct me as a political basis for making that decision, I considered that inappropriate and in fact unethical. Foster says the person who told him to withhold the revised cost estimates from Congress was Medicare boss Tom Scully. I want to thank Tom Scully of of and the whole staff at HJS and C-C. Scully was the administration's lead negotiator on the prescription drug bill. At the same time he was also negotiating a job for himself with a high-powered Washington law firm, where he later became a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. He was negotiating for his job at the same time that the Medicare legislation was being considered. He wound up taking this job 10 days after the president signed the legislation. It has been one example of the incestuous relationship between Congress and the industry and just one of the reasons the pharmaceutical lobby almost never loses a political battle that affects its bottom line. Former Congressman Billy Tozan, who helped push the prescription drug bill through the house, didn't disagree. This bill been good for the drug industry? It's been good for the patients and the drug industry represents. And in terms of profits for the drug industry? Profits and volumes, yes. Your own friend, John Dingle, says that of the 1500 bills over the last eight years dealing with pharmaceutical issues. The drug companies almost without exception have gotten what they wanted. Yeah, they I would I would think he's correct. They've done fairly well. Why has this lobby been so successful? I believe it's because they stood for the right things.
[9:31]Billy Tozan of the House of Representatives did great work on this bill. Just six weeks after the prescription drug bill was signed into law, Tozan began discussions with the pharmaceutical industry to become its chief lobbyist in Washington. He says it was just one of several lucrative opportunities he'd been offered just before he received some very bad news. I got a call from a doctor at Bethesda who said, you got cancer and it's uh, it's extremely rare and it could kill you. And then everything changed. Tozan had a cancerous tumor removed from his intestine and was treated with a new medicine called Avastin, that had never before been used on that form of cancer. The treatment was successful, and as a result, Tozan said he felt he owed his life to the drug industry. After serving out his congressional term, he accepted a $2 million a year job as president of Pharma. There was an extraordinary moment where my wife literally looked me in the eye and said, Look, you're going to do well wherever you go, Billy. You got a lot of great offers. And maybe you ought to think about working for the people that struggle every day to try to invent the medicines that save lives like yours. And that was a pretty important moment in my life and it was a moment I decided that this was the work I wanted to do. Headaches or no. When when you push so hard for a bill that's that controversial and then within a matter of months you go to work for the industry that's going to benefit from it. It does cause you some concern. I don't want to appear too cynical. But you are. Well, there are a lot of other people around here who have the same questions. You're saying you shouldn't you cynical like everybody else in the world. I mean, this doesn't look good. I mean, you push this bill through that gets a, uh, that produces a windfall for the drug companies and then a short time later, you go to work for the drug lobby at a salary of $2 million. There's nothing I could have done in my life after leaving Congress that wouldn't have had, I didn't have some impact on in 25 years in Congress and, if that looks bad to you, have at it. That's the truth. In fairness to Billy Tozan and former Medicare Chief Tom Scully, they weren't the only public officials involved with the prescription drug bill who later went to work for the pharmaceutical industry. Just before the vote, Tozan cited the people who had been most helpful in getting it passed. I specifically want to thank the staffs of our committees from Ways and Means, John McMahon who did such a great job. Within a few months, McManus left Congress and started his own lobbying firm. Among his new clients were Pharma, Pfizer, Lily, and Merk. from the majority side of the Finance Committee, Linda Fishman. Fishman left to become a lobbyist with the drug manufacturer Amgen. not the least of all but the Energy and Commerce Committee staff who toiled so hard for us. Chief of staff Pat Morrissey. Morrissey took a job lobbying for drug companies Novartis and Hoffman LaRoche. Jeremy Allen. He went to Johnson and Johnson. Kathleen Weldon and Jim Barnett. She went to lobby for Biogen, a biotech company. He left the lobby for Hoffman LaRoche. They did a marvelous job for this house and we owe them a debt of thanks. Thank you all. In all, at least 15 congressional staffers, congressmen and federal officials who worked on the prescription drug bill left to go to work for the pharmaceutical industry, whose profits were increased by several billion dollars. They have unlimited resources, unlimited. And when they push real hard to get something accomplished in the Congress of the United States, uh, they can get, they can get it done. In January, one of the first things the new Democratic House of Representatives did was to make it mandatory for Medicare to negotiate lower prices with the drug companies. A similar measure faces stiff opposition in the Senate, where the drug lobby is spending millions of dollars to defeat it. The president has already announced that if the bill passes, he will veto it.
