Obama is the Drug Companies' B-tch

[Sinatra]

Well-well-well - for those who have attempted to decry the insurance industry as the great Satan, here we have the White House being bought and paid for in full by the massive power of the drug industry.

Wonder what backroom deal was agreed to for this help as it pertains to the proposed Obamacare?

RealClearPolitics - Politics - Aug 08, 2009 - Drug industry helping Obama overhaul health care

Drug industry helping Obama overhaul health care
David Espo
The nation's drugmakers stand ready to spend $150 million to help President Barack Obama overhaul health care this fall, according to numerous officials, a staggering sum that could dwarf attempts to derail Obama's top domestic priority.

The White House and allies in Congress are well aware of the effort by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a somewhat surprising political alliance, given the drug industry's recent history of siding with Republicans and the Democrats' disdain for special interests.

The campaign, now in its early stages, includes television advertising under PhRMA's own name and commercials aired in conjunction with the liberal group, Families USA.

Numerous people with knowledge of PhRMA's plans said they had been told it would likely reach $150 million and perhaps $200 million. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to divulge details.

Additionally, the industry is the major contributor to Healthy Economy Now, which recently completed a $12 million round of advertising nationally and in several states. The ads were made by firms with close ties to Democrats and the White House and generally reflected the administration's changing rhetoric on health care.

In an interview, Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, said, "We will have a significant presence over the August recess, both on television and newspapers and on radio, but we have not finalized details for our fall campaign."

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said the partnership with the deep-pocketed drug industry is one of mutual self-interest, even though the two groups disagree on numerous issues. "We want to achieve coverage for everyone. For PhRMA, this would improve volume for prescription sales because everyone" would have better access to medicine, he said.

Any health care bill that makes it to Obama's desk is expected to extend health insurance to the nearly 50 million who now lack it. That would mean a huge new pool of potential customers for drug companies and other health care providers. That, in turn, has created an incentive to offer concessions to the White House and lawmakers in hopes of shaping the bill, rather than simply opposing it.




The Associated Press

,,,

 

[American Horse]

Well-well-well - for those who have attempted to decry the insurance industry as the great Satan, here we have the White House being bought and paid for in full by the massive power of the drug industry.

Wonder what backroom deal was agreed to for this help as it pertains to the proposed Obamacare?

RealClearPolitics - Politics - Aug 08, 2009 - Drug industry helping Obama overhaul health care

Drug industry helping Obama overhaul health care
David Espo
The nation's drugmakers stand ready to spend $150 million to help President Barack Obama overhaul health care this fall, according to numerous officials, a staggering sum that could dwarf attempts to derail Obama's top domestic priority.

The White House and allies in Congress are well aware of the effort by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a somewhat surprising political alliance, given the drug industry's recent history of siding with Republicans and the Democrats' disdain for special interests.

The campaign, now in its early stages, includes television advertising under PhRMA's own name and commercials aired in conjunction with the liberal group, Families USA.

Numerous people with knowledge of PhRMA's plans said they had been told it would likely reach $150 million and perhaps $200 million. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to divulge details.

Additionally, the industry is the major contributor to Healthy Economy Now, which recently completed a $12 million round of advertising nationally and in several states. The ads were made by firms with close ties to Democrats and the White House and generally reflected the administration's changing rhetoric on health care.

In an interview, Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, said, "We will have a significant presence over the August recess, both on television and newspapers and on radio, but we have not finalized details for our fall campaign."

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said the partnership with the deep-pocketed drug industry is one of mutual self-interest, even though the two groups disagree on numerous issues. "We want to achieve coverage for everyone. For PhRMA, this would improve volume for prescription sales because everyone" would have better access to medicine, he said.

Any health care bill that makes it to Obama's desk is expected to extend health insurance to the nearly 50 million who now lack it. That would mean a huge new pool of potential customers for drug companies and other health care providers. That, in turn, has created an incentive to offer concessions to the White House and lawmakers in hopes of shaping the bill, rather than simply opposing it.

The Associated Press

They are whipped and they know it. They're just getting in line to cross Messiah Obama's palms with alms.

The new Healthcare Act will curtail research for drug innovations because of cost cutting. When they gave to the Republicans it was because they thought they were giving to those who could help them; now they are giving to those whom they are afraid can hurt them.

David Blumenthal, Obama's new head of Health Information Technologies is uneasy with the costs of medical progress; he stresses that two thirds of the annual increases in health spending results from medical innovation.

 

[Sinatra]

Well-well-well - for those who have attempted to decry the insurance industry as the great Satan, here we have the White House being bought and paid for in full by the massive power of the drug industry.

Wonder what backroom deal was agreed to for this help as it pertains to the proposed Obamacare?

RealClearPolitics - Politics - Aug 08, 2009 - Drug industry helping Obama overhaul health care

Drug industry helping Obama overhaul health care
David Espo
The nation's drugmakers stand ready to spend $150 million to help President Barack Obama overhaul health care this fall, according to numerous officials, a staggering sum that could dwarf attempts to derail Obama's top domestic priority.

The White House and allies in Congress are well aware of the effort by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a somewhat surprising political alliance, given the drug industry's recent history of siding with Republicans and the Democrats' disdain for special interests.

The campaign, now in its early stages, includes television advertising under PhRMA's own name and commercials aired in conjunction with the liberal group, Families USA.

Numerous people with knowledge of PhRMA's plans said they had been told it would likely reach $150 million and perhaps $200 million. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to divulge details.

Additionally, the industry is the major contributor to Healthy Economy Now, which recently completed a $12 million round of advertising nationally and in several states. The ads were made by firms with close ties to Democrats and the White House and generally reflected the administration's changing rhetoric on health care.

In an interview, Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, said, "We will have a significant presence over the August recess, both on television and newspapers and on radio, but we have not finalized details for our fall campaign."

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said the partnership with the deep-pocketed drug industry is one of mutual self-interest, even though the two groups disagree on numerous issues. "We want to achieve coverage for everyone. For PhRMA, this would improve volume for prescription sales because everyone" would have better access to medicine, he said.

Any health care bill that makes it to Obama's desk is expected to extend health insurance to the nearly 50 million who now lack it. That would mean a huge new pool of potential customers for drug companies and other health care providers. That, in turn, has created an incentive to offer concessions to the White House and lawmakers in hopes of shaping the bill, rather than simply opposing it.

The Associated Press

They are whipped and they know it. They're just getting in line to cross Messiah Obama's palms with alms.

The new Healthcare Act will curtail research for drug innovations because of cost cutting. When they gave to the Republicans it was because they thought they were giving to those who could help them; now they are giving to those whom they are afraid can hurt them.

David Blumenthal, Obama's new head of Health Information Technologies is uneasy with the costs of medical progress; He stresses that two thirds of the annual increases in health spending result from medical innovation.

Yup.

 

[Gudrid]

Agreed - you failed completely to make a cogent point...

Admittedly, it doesn't hold the depth of your political lolcat. But I made the point I was trying to make just fine, thanks bunches.

 

[Sinatra]

Agreed - you failed completely to make a cogent point...

Admittedly, it doesn't hold the depth of your political lolcat. But I made the point I was trying to make just fine, thanks bunches.

You are correct - Obama is capitulating to the demands of the drug companies in the hopes they will assist him with passage of Obamacare.

He is welcoming the very lobbyists he was elected to battle.

The money changers remain in the temple and Obama is now in their debt...

 

[Gudrid]

Yep. So now we find out whether he screws them over or screws us over. Ain't politics grand?

 

[Sinatra]

Yep. So now we find out whether he screws them over or screws us over. Ain't politics grand?

This blatant lying by Obama - backtracking on his election platform when he decried the undo influence of lobbyists on legislation - and called out the drug companies specifically, it simply reeks of the worst kind of politics.

What change have we received? Not only more of the same - but the amount of shit coming out of this White House has increased exponentially.

Are you aware of the primary ad agency the drug companies will be utilizing in their $150 million pro-Obamacare ad compaign? Axelrod's former agency!!!

Good lord folks - the depths of depravity this administration has descended to appears to know no limit - with far more to come...

 

[VaYank5150]

Good lord folks - the depths of depravity this administration has descended to appears to know no limit - with far more to come...

Uh....yeah....

A senior Defense Department official says a Pentagon audit has found evidence that a subsidiary of Halliburton may have overcharged the U.S. government by as much as $61 million for fuel deliveries in Iraq. The company, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, admits no wrongdoing. Hear NPR's John Burnett

Audit: Halliburton Overcharged U.S. in Iraq : NPR

 

[Sinatra]

Some history on Obama and the drug companies - it appears he was benefiting from the relationship prior to becoming president...

Big Pharma opens wallet to Dems

Liberals have lost their reputation as the long-standing foes to drugmakers as party lines become blurred with McCain.

Democratic senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the top recipients of donations from the pharmaceutical industry, according to The Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit, non-partisan research group in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, donations to Sen. John McCain, who was recently endorsed by President Bush as the official Republican candidate, pale in comparison.

Obama maintains a slight edge over his Democratic rival, with $181,000 in Big Pharma donations through Jan. 31, compared with Clinton's $174,000, according to the center. McCain is far behind with $44,000.

 

[VaYank5150]

Published on Thursday, April 3, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Halliburton, Dick Cheney, and Wartime Spoils
by Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray

When Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle revealed that he was getting $725,000 to help Global Crossing navigate the national security issues surrounding the sale of its assets, the press jumped all over Perle, and rightly so. There was indeed something fishy about the chairman of a board that advises the Pentagon making that kind of money to help a company that was having problems with national security issues. Perle is also on the board of Onset Technology, the leading provider of message conversion technology and a major supplier to Bechtel - one of the leading candidates for rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure.

As the Center for Public Integrity has documented, this kind of thing is quite prevalent on the Defense Policy Board, where at least nine of the 30 members have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. As more and more wartime contracts are announced, more and more conflicts of interest are coming to light. After all, the Bush administration is riddled with ties to the weapons, engineering, construction, and oil companies that have the most to profit from a war in Iraq. Perle's story is certainly not unusual.

However, of all the administration members with potential conflicts of interest, none seems more troubling than Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney is former CEO of Halliburton, an oil-services company that also provides construction and military support services - a triple-header of wartime spoils.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers awarded a no-bid contract to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq to Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. The contract was granted under a January Bush administration waiver that, according to the Washington Post, allowed "government agencies to handpick companies for Iraqi reconstruction projects."

The contract, which was not announced until more than two weeks after it was awarded, was open-ended, with no time limits and no dollar limits. It was also a "cost-plus" contract, meaning that the company is guaranteed to recover costs and then make a guaranteed profit on top of that. Its value is estimated at tens of millions of dollars.

This is not the first buck that Cheney's former company has made off military conflict and likely won't be the last. KBR currently has thousands of military support personnel on the ground in Kuwait and Turkey as part of a multi-year contract worth close to a billion dollars. The engineering subsidiary was also one of a select few firms invited to bid on an initial $900 million USAID contract for rebuilding post-war Iraq. Though it didn't get that job, Halliburton says it is still in the running for subcontracts and there will likely be plenty more opportunities. After all, the American Academy of Sciences estimates the rebuilding Iraq will cost between $30 and $105 billion dollars. At a recent investor conference call, Halliburton reported a 30% increase in year-over-year revenues, to $1.6 billion, for KBR.

Cheney, who served as CEO from 1995 to 2000, continues to receive as much as $1 million a year in deferred compensation as Halliburton executives enjoy a seat at the table during Administration discussions over how to handle post-war oil production in Iraq.

Halliburton, Dick Cheney, and Wartime Spoils

 

[Sinatra]

Support for health care reform is in decline as a majority of likely voters polled indicate favoring tax cuts over new spending for health care reform:

What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls - Rasmussen Reports™

Fifty-four percent (54%) of voters now say tax cuts for the middle class are more important than new spending for health care reform, even as the president’s top economic advisers signal that tax hikes may be necessary to support the plan.

 

[VaYank5150]

Fifty-four percent (54%) of voters now say tax cuts for the middle class are more important than new spending for health care reform, even as the president’s top economic advisers signal that tax hikes may be necessary to support the plan.

Let's see,
The GOP plan for middle class tax cuts is......?
The GOP plan for healthcare reform is..........?

 

[Sinatra]

Obama is proving to be as divisive, if not more so, than his presidential predecessor, with the current health care debate dividing a nation upon itself...

Obama loses footing on middle ground - BostonHerald.com
_____

Obama loses footing on middle ground

By Bill O’Reilly


...Polls show the nation is almost evenly divided when it comes to Obama’s vision for the country. A Rasmussen poll this week has the president’s approval rating at 49 percent, while 51 percent disapprove. That’s even when the margin of error kicks in.

We are a country at odds. Just six months ago, the president’s approval rating approached 70 percent as the nation looked forward to better times under a young, dynamic leader. But that was then...

But it is the trust factor that has really frayed tempers. Conservative Americans, almost 40 percent of the population, are outraged at Obama’s expansionist policies. The right simply does not trust the president and probably never will.

Liberals, about 20 percent of the folks, are standing by their man. They want a huge federal presence to dictate who gets what in health care, and they love the income redistribution strategy in general. In Obama, the hopes of the committed left are being realized.

But it is the other 40 percent of Americans, mainly independents, who are losing hope and fairly quickly. Most Americans are not hard-core ideologues and are willing to give any new president a chance. But with the recession still causing massive pain and a president who increasingly seems unsure of himself, the independent folks are getting nervous...

Since last January, there certainly has been plenty of change. But, as the polls prove, fewer and fewer folks are believing in it.

 

[American Horse]

Good lord folks - the depths of depravity this administration has descended to appears to know no limit - with far more to come...

Uh....yeah....

A senior Defense Department official says a Pentagon audit has found evidence that a subsidiary of Halliburton may have overcharged the U.S. government by as much as $61 million for fuel deliveries in Iraq. The company, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, admits no wrongdoing. Hear NPR's John Burnett

Audit: Halliburton Overcharged U.S. in Iraq : NPR

Cost plus contracts are always open to audit; that's why there will be an audit in the first place. All the rest is irrelevant. Also in agreeing to do cost plus contracts the conractor, in this case an oil service company, not an oil company in the conventional sense, agrees to do the work for some very limited but guaranteed percentage of estimated "profit", which is actually a "mark up" and not real profit in the usual sense at all.

 

[VaYank5150]

Cost plus contracts are always open to audit; that's why there will be an audit in the first place. All the rest is irrelevant. Also in agreeing to do cost plus contracts the conractor, in this case an oil service company, not an oil company in the conventional sense, agrees to do the work for some very limited but guaranteed percentage of estimated "profit", which is actually a "mark up" and not real profit in the usual sense at all.

You OBVIOUSLY do not work in the contracting business. Please don't attend to explain to me how a "cost plus" contract works. The issue here is the war profiteering done by Cheney and his pals at KBR.

 

[American Horse]

Cost plus contracts are always open to audit; that's why there will be an audit in the first place. All the rest is irrelevant. Also in agreeing to do cost plus contracts the conractor, in this case an oil service company, not an oil company in the conventional sense, agrees to do the work for some very limited but guaranteed percentage of estimated "profit", which is actually a "mark up" and not real profit in the usual sense at all.

You OBVIOUSLY do not work in the contracting business. Please don't attend to explain to me how a "cost plus" contract works. The issue here is the war profiteering done by Cheney and his pals at KBR.

Actually I've been a contractor for 37 years, so why don't you tell me where I'm in the wrong. I'm interested...My comment is that audits are understood to be a part of the process in those contracts, at the discretion of the government, so it would be ridiculous to deliberately commit fraud as to those costs.

Edit: BTW the Obama administration is using the same contractors in the same capacity and contract procedures. It's just that now it's ok. Very few companies are able to step in and handle the kind of work which needs to be done in these operations, and we're lucky to have patriotic companies who will put their reputations on the line knowing that they will almost certainly be called criminals by the left. They actually take a cut in their ordinary profit to do this work and take on nothing but headaches.

 

[VaYank5150]

Actually I've been a contractor for 37 years, so why don't you tell me where I'm in the wrong. I'm interested...

So....in every Cost Plus contract you have bid on, you have been 100% accurate and open with your exact costs. Is that correct?

 

[anna]

If all else fails, barry soetoro can just phucking bail, and go back to, jakarta indonesia, his real homeland!!

 

[Sinatra]

Cost plus contracts are always open to audit; that's why there will be an audit in the first place. All the rest is irrelevant. Also in agreeing to do cost plus contracts the conractor, in this case an oil service company, not an oil company in the conventional sense, agrees to do the work for some very limited but guaranteed percentage of estimated "profit", which is actually a "mark up" and not real profit in the usual sense at all.

You OBVIOUSLY do not work in the contracting business. Please don't attend to explain to me how a "cost plus" contract works. The issue here is the war profiteering done by Cheney and his pals at KBR.

Actually, the issue here in this thread, is Obama's quid quo pro with the drug companies - among the most signficant of all lobby groups in DC.

Do you support such alliances? Your obession with Cheney and military contracts would suggest not - so when shall you share with us your outrage against Obama regarding the current matter of his kneeling before the prescription drug industry...

 

[American Horse]

Actually I've been a contractor for 37 years, so why don't you tell me where I'm in the wrong. I'm interested...

So....in every Cost Plus contract you have bid on, you have been 100% accurate and open with your exact costs. Is that correct?

You seem to be arguing my side on this. Of course it is very difficult to keep track of all expenses; do we write off the complete cost of an item or of a thousand items when we have no further use for surplus items after the contract is complete, or keep them for later use incurring storage costs - how to charge for those? the problems with those types of contracts are endless and need clarification up-front.

I've always refused cost plus contracts because of the jeopardy of disagreements later over value provided and challenges to my honesty. I've always said that I will give a price including a percent for profit, and take my chances. But big corporations have platoons of accountants and systems set up, and will do those to keep their "oar in the water" for future work, otherwise they'll loose their customer base.

But I doubt that all but a miniscule number enter into a cost plus contract planning to over charge; those who would do that are almost certainly comfined to the companies which are on the verge of bankruptcy or business failure. The reason for that is that to do that despoils the whole purpose for doing the work; it certainly is not the profit motive, but it's more-so patriotic duty, and to provide continued service for an established customer base.

Cost plus contracts go for only fractional mark-up as compared to the usual competitive profit mark-up for bid, where a company might generate a percentage of profit over costs of 15% (a very high mark-up) going with a cost plus agreement, the mark-up might be limited to 5 to 7%. But then they get to recognize all their costs direct and indirect required to accomplish the job. I apologize for taking up space for this explanation, but this comes up too often not to at least be seen in a clear light; this reply is a point of personal priviledge; my credibility relative to a lifetime of work was questioned.