Big Pharma makes a big fat withdrawal from your pocket:
When Congress passed the Medicare Modernization Act, lawmakers were told it would cost no more than $400 billion over 10 years. In the budget President Bush sent to Congress Monday an estimate puts the cost of the new drug benefit at $350 billion over just the next five years. And Democrats argue the cost would be even higher, at $913 billion dollars over the next decade.
(The Washington Post has it as $1.2 trillion over 10 years.)
Under that law, the government is prohibited from using its status as a large customer to get lower drug prices. So for all the talk about importing drugs from Canada, there’s nothing preventing us from negotiating lower prices ourselves, except that PhRMA (the drug industry’s lobby) wants your money.
That’s just flat-out looting. Big government for me but not thee.
