Big Pharma is the National Rifle Association of health care.

The Democrats' promise to negotiate drug prices is set to fail again.

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Over the years of my teaching career, it was not unusual that when my younger colleagues thought about retirement at all, they knew very little.

Take Medicare, for example.

Many assumed that Medicare was free for seniors and it covered all healthcare needs.

Of course, neither is true.

Medicare is not free. There’s a premium. The cost is deducted from our Social Security benefit, if we have that benefit. 

Navigating health care as a senior is a complicated business which I won’t even begin to deal with in this issue of the newsletter.

Instead, I want to address the failure of the Democrats over the past 30 years to lower the prices of medication which are the highest in the industrialized world. 

The government has no role in the negotiation of drug costs, even for Medicare.

And that is just the way Big Pharma, the billion-dollar drug industry, wants it to be.

In 2003, when a Republican Congress passed a drug benefit as part of Medicare, they insisted that it be a profit center for the drug industry and prohibited the government from negotiating drug prices.

One of Joe Biden’s signature campaign promises was to lower drug prices by having the government directly negotiate the cost.

The repeal of the prohibition was in Joe Biden’s original massive social spending bill.

It is unlikely negotiated drug prices will be in the final version.

The pharmaceutical industry has 1,500 paid lobbyists.

Organizations like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America are the National Rifle Association for high drug prices.

Just as with gun control, the American people overwhelmingly support limiting the private ownership of guns.

But the gun lobby, with or without the faltering NRA, bribe politicians with what seems like unlimited campaign dollars.

The drug lobby does the same thing with equal success.

Even with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, and with overwhelming support for direct government control over drug prices, it will likely fail.

For example, this year the drug companies have bought the vote of Arizona’s Democratic Senator Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

In the 2020 election cycle, pharmaceutical political action committees contributed more money to her than they did the whole six years she served in the US House.

Sinema used to call herself a progressive Democrat. But that changed when drug dollars were offered to her.

If the repeal of the ban on negotiated drug prices is killed, Sinema can be credited.

But there is so much drug money out there, if they didn’t buy her, it would have been someone else.