Healthcare Hirelings

Healthcare Hirelings: "Wilbert Joseph “Billy” Tauzin pledged $80 billion for a “seat at the table” in White House negotiations over the healthcare reform that Barack Obama campaigned for as a candidate and has been promoting during the first year of his presidency. Tauzin, a former congressman from Louisiana’s Third District, is now president and CEO of the powerful drug lobby Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.

He promised an $80-billion savings in drug costs in exchange for a continued ban on importation of foreign drugs and a White House pledge that the administration would not seek even greater savings by negotiating for lower prices through Medicare. In addition, PhRMA promised, and has already begun, a multi-million-dollar media campaign in support of Obama’s efforts to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system.

“The White House blessed it,” Tauzin told the Los Angeles Times, which reported on August 4 that Tauzin and other executives from the pharmaceutical industry met with President Obama, his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and White House aides at the executive mansion in July to discuss drug-company support for the president’s plan. White House officials confirmed that the issue of drug importations was discussed, but would not say whether there was an agreement to block Medicare price negotiations.

As a candidate for president, Obama campaigned against the drug companies and their influence in Washington and ran an ad featuring Tauzin, condemning the role the former congressman played in writing legislation that prevents Medicare from negotiating for lower prices. But PhRMA, which spent millions to defeat the Clinton healthcare plan in the early ’90s, is a White House ally in the current healthcare debate. The drug lobby has brought back Harry and Louise (actors Harry Johnson and Louise Caire Clark) to reprise their roles in the insurance industry ad that helped sink the Clinton plan. Then Harry and Louise sat at the kitchen table voicing their worries about putting the federal government in charge of everyone’s healthcare. (“If they choose, we lose,” was the tagline.) Now they are all for it.

“It looks like we may finally get healthcare reform,” Harry says in the ad sponsored by PhRMA and the liberal advocacy group Families USA. “It’s about time,” Louise responds. “A little more cooperation, a little less politics and we can get the job done this time,” she says at the ad’s conclusion.

The Big Switcheroo
Tauzin is experienced in the art of changing sides at an opportune time. An assistant majority whip, he was co-founder of the conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the 1980s. He switched parties after the Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 elections and became deputy House majority whip for the GOP and the first congressman in history to have leadership positions with both parties. As a Republican, Tauzin was chairman of the committee that guided to passage the 2003 bill, backed by President George W. Bush, to add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. The bill, which critics claimed was written by the pharmaceutical lobby, went through the longest roll call in House history and was finally passed in a 3 a.m. vote. The following year, Tauzin chose not to run for reelection. In January 2005, the same month he left Congress, he was hired by PhRMA for a reported $2.5 million a year."