News roundup

US drug companies help pay for Bush inauguration

Fred Charatan Florida

The glitz of President George W Bush’s inauguration ceremony owed a considerable debt to the US pharmaceutical industry, which paid $1.7m (£1.1m) towards the estimated $17m bill for the occasion.

Its generosity at the crowning moment of President Bush’s journey to the White House mirrored the substantial support that it gave to the Texan governor during his election campaign. Over three quarters of the industry’s contributions went to Republicans.

Last November, the non-profit watchdog group Public Citizen predicted that the prescription drug industry would spend about $230m during the election. The money would be spent three ways—on supporting the industry’s lobbyists in Congress, on campaign contributions, and on issue advertisements in print and on television by Citizens for Better Medicare, a front group for the industry.

Drug company lobbying for the first half of 2000 reached $42.9m, according to disclosure reports, said Public Citizen. The leader was Schering-Plough at $3 880 000.

"Most of that money will go toward protecting the drug industry’s extraordinary profits and preventing consumers from obtaining affordable prescriptions," said Public Citizen's president, Joan Clayton.

The drug industry opposed President Clinton’s plan to extend the Medicare programme so that it partially covered the cost of prescription drugs for its beneficiaries (BMJ 2000;320;1093). It ran a series of TV ads at the time, which said, "I don’t want big government in my medicine cabinet."

It also opposed price controls on drugs legislated last year in the state of Maine. Alan Holmer, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, condemned the Maine law as "anti-patient, anti-innovation, anti-business, and we believe unconstitutional." He said that price controls on drugs would not help those who lack coverage with prescription drugs, but would harm those waiting for new cures and treatments for such diseases as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and AIDS.

"Americans don’t need a patchwork of state price control approaches, whose overall effect would be to slow the development of new and better medicines," Mr Holmer said, "We need national insurance legislation that would extend insurance coverage to those who lack it."

During last October’s US Senate debate on reimportation of prescription drugs the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said, "We strongly oppose the drug reimport bill and urge the Senate to reject it. For the sake of American patients, senators should heed the warnings of nearly a dozen former Food and Drug Administration commissioners who say that reimportation will put patient health at risk."

For their contributions to President Bush’s victory, the drug manufacturers hope for a halt in moves to regulate the cost of patented prescription drugs, a vigorous campaign against the production of generic substitutes abroad, and prohibition of reimportation of drugs whose purity and efficacy cannot be guaranteed.