This week’s HHS proposed rule requiring everyone to carry contraceptive insurance and forcing insurers to cover the entire price is the latest bit of Public Policy Profiteering on birth control from the drug industry, I argue in my column today.
There’s a rich history of Democratic politicians subsidizing Pharma through birth-control initiatives.
For instance, Schering Plough, a contraceptive maker, lobbied Congress in 2008 on “legislative proposals affecting ‘average manufacturers’ price’.” One such proposal was Senator Obama’s “Prevention Through Affordable Access Act.” Obama’s bill became law in 2009 when it was tucked into an omnibus appropriations bill. What did it do?
The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that it “will allow pharmaceutical companies to once again supply college-health clinics with discounted birth-control pills and other contraceptives.”
But, as I explained in Obamanomics, my 2009 book, this wasn’t accurate. Drug companies were allowed to discount contraceptives as much as they liked to college kids. “The problem for the drug makers was that, under a 2005 law, if drug makers offered students a discount on contraceptives, they would also have to slightly discount that same drug to Medicaid.”
Obama’s provision was about letting drug companies get more price-sensitive customers (college kids) for cheap, while charging a very price-insensitive customer (Medicaid) as much as possible.
Then there was Hilllary Clinton’s little racket with Planned Parenthood and the maker of Plan B, which I wrote about in 2007:
The most common form of emergency contraception is the drug Levonogesterol, marketed under the name Plan B. Barr Labs, which owns the patent on Plan B, has a deal with Planned Parenthood in which Barr sells the drug wholesale to Planned Parenthood for $4.25 a kit, according to media accounts of internal Planned Parenthood documents made public during a court case. A pro-life group’s survey of Planned Parenthood clinics found an average retail price of about $25, yielding an average $20 profit for each Plan B sale.
Clinton has done yeoman’s work to pump up the sales of Plan B. Last year, while holding up a Bush nomination until the Food and Drug Administration allowed Plan B — unlike other contraceptives — to be sold without a prescription, Clinton proposed an amendment to the Budget Resolution earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize Plan B and other contraceptives. She has reintroduced the Plan B subsidy bill this year.
…
While Barr’s donations to Hillary’s campaign are surprisingly small, the timing appears strangely blatant.
Last year, just as Andrew von Eschenbach’s name was being floated for FDA director, Barr CEO Bruce Downey cut a $1,000 check to Clinton’s campaign. A couple of weeks later, Hillary announced her hold on Eschenbach’s nomination and introduced her Plan B subsidy bill.
This year, the day after Clinton introduced her Plan B awareness bill, Barr Executive Vice President Frederick J. Killion donated $1,000 to her campaign.
Although the timing is interesting, those paltry contributions from Barr hardly give Clinton a reason to push Plan B. Boosting Planned Parenthood’s bottom line, however, certainly serves Hillary’s purposes.
According to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, Planned Parenthood’s various affiliates — including a PAC and a 527 — spent $13 million in 2000 in efforts to defeat George W. Bush, including paying for nearly 10 percent of all the pro-Gore ads that aired. In the last two weeks before the election, Planned Parenthood spent more than the Gore campaign. In recent election cycles, the pattern has been the same.
