Drug Industry's Suspicious Support Of The Medicare Drug Benefit Plan - Brief Article

Healthfacts, Oct, 2001 by Arthur A. Levin

After seeing the handwriting on the wall, the drug industry has abandoned its opposition to a Medicare drug benefit and come out in support. In fact, a recent industry-sponsored ad proclaims, "America's seniors must have prescription drug coverage." This policy shift sounds promising: "new medicines, new hope" the ad proclaims. But the industry's apparent change of heart needs to be examined with a critical eye. What the drug industry is actually promoting is the best of all possible self-interested worlds: Government pays the bill, and the industry is accountable to no one.

How does the industry present its case? The ad states that imposition of government regulation to control the cost and quality of a Medicare drug benefit would eliminate "competition and choice." This in turn, the industry alleges, would slow the cure and prevention of the diseases of aging, condemning countless seniors to nursing homes who would otherwise lead productive lives.

As if to reassure the public that this is not just industry hyperbole, the ad quotes the Alliance for Aging Research, whose director, Daniel Perry promises that a "robust climate" for research will, among other things, produce a cure for osteoporosis, prevent Alzheimer's and tame cancer. Of course a robust climate is defined by the industry as one that encourages "competition and choice" through the absence of government oversight. The Alliance, a non-profit organization, has a 20-member Board of Directors, 7 of whom are drug company executives.

Unfortunately, the high cost of prescription drugs aside, many Americans, including legislators, seem all too willing to believe that the industry has the public's best interests at heart. But advocates who are seasoned industry watchers believe that this newfound concern for the well being of seniors is disingenuous. "New medicines, new hope" is an appealing, but according to Marcia Angell, MD, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, the slogan is only partly true. While acknowledging that some new drugs are important advances, she adds, "Many other new drugs add little to the therapeutic armamentarium except expense and confusion."

The industry's recent embrace of a Medicare drug benefit is, in my opinion, a Trojan horse. It cloaks the industry's long running campaign to roll back government oversight with the promise of a better, healthier life for seniors. But should the industry get its way, we will likely awake to the reality that an unregulated Medicare prescription benefit profits industry considerably more than seniors.

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Arthur A. Levin, MPH, is the director of the Center for Medical Consumers in New York City.