Big Pharma Guts Already-Signed Trade Deal

Back in 2004, both parties in the House and Senate overwhelmingly supported the U.S. Australian "Free" Trade Agreement. I put "free" in quotes because it was nothing of the sort. It was a bill chock full of strict protections for Big Money interests like the pharmaceutical industry - anti-consumer protections both parties endorsed. For instance, the pact gave the drug industry the tools to prevent cheaper, FDA-approved medicines from being imported by Americans. It also challenged Australia's successful program that prevents drug industry price gouging. Still, thanks to demands by some progressives in Australia, at least a few protections slipped into the pact protecting ordinary citizens of both countries. But now, a year after the pact was signed, even those minimal protections are now under attack by the drug industry.

The Sydney Morning Herald today reports that "Australia appears set to scrap a key price control in the U.S. trade deal" after "intense lobbying by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry." Specifically, Australia's conservative government is planning on scrapping the so-called "evergreening" amendment that subjects drug companies "to multimillion-dollar fines if they are found to have stopped other companies from introducing cheaper drugs." For more on evergreening, see this piece by Australian medical school professor Thomas Faunce.

The Morning Herald notes that the evergreening amendment was originally put into the trade pact after it was "demanded by Labor as a condition of its support for the pact." Sadly, that kind of serious, populist opposition to drug industry profiteering is only found among a few courageous lawmakers in America - and has never been a major tenet of any party's platform in the United States' money-drenched political system. And the reason is simple if you take two seconds and glance at campaign contributions or lobbying disclosure reports.

The truth is, the drug industry spends massive amounts of money not only buying votes in Congress, but perhaps more importantly buying America's politicians into limiting the terms of the health care debate. Instead of a debate over regulating prices like every other industrialized nation on earth, we get a debate over how much taxpayer cash to throw at the pharmaceutical industry to subsidize its rip offs. Instead of a debate over patent abuses, we get a debates over how much R&D tax breaks to give the industry. In short, instead of a debate about whether this industry - the most profitable on the planet - should be allowed to profiteer off people's health needs, we get a debate about how best to further enrich drug companies.

Oh sure, the drug companies and the corrupt lawmakers who shill for them argue that they need to make huge profits because they supposedly spend so much on R&D. But that's just a disgustingly dishonest distortion. First and foremost, many of the drugs that the industry charges such high prices for were originally researched and developed with taxpayer money. Second, the drug industry spends more on marketing and administrative costs (read: executive salaries) than it does on R&D. And finally, documents prove that the drug industry has long been inflating its R&D costs to make its arguments for high prices.

Now, today, we see that the drug companies don't just control American politics - it has its tentacles all over the world, whether keeping AIDS drug prices high for African relief efforts, or getting Australia to back off its anti-profiteering efforts. When will it all end? How many more people have to die because they can't afford their medicines before the world's political leaders act?

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