Reply #49: All right I'll indulge you a little bit

[notesdev]

Please refer to HR 3200 section 123, which starts on page 30. Besides farming out a whole lot of major decisions (such as what is and is not a covered benefit) to a "Health Benefits Advisory Committee", it also specifies the composition of the committee. This committee is to consist of 26 members, 18 of which are not to be government employees, and 17 of which are to be political appointments (e.g. campaign donors and agents thereof). This insidious little section also manages to lock in current profit levels (15%) in describing requirements for the "enhanced" plan (pg. 33 line 17) - which in turn implies an increase in profits for the basic plan. While it gives the HHS Secretary the ability to reject the recommendations, it does not give him/her the ability to adopt different ones (as per section 124).

As if this were not enough leeway for corporate influence, later in the bill (section 1401) establishes "an independent Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission" with broad authority (e.g. "determine national priorities for research" which easily translates to "determine who gets hundreds of billions of dollars, independent of Congressional oversight" - Hank Paulson is probably beating his head against the wall wondering why he didn't think of this one). Its composition, once again, is a strong majority of non-government members (page 508). As if in anticipation of the obvious, we are later assured on page 510, that "No more than 3 of the Members of the Commission may be representatives of pharmaceutical or device manufacturers", as if that requirement could not be evaded as easily as similar requirements in the banking system have been. Note that there is no similar restriction on the even more powerful committee (HBAC) described above.

This is one small example, covering about a dozen pages total of the thousand page bill.

Big Pharma wouldn't be sinking $150 million into advertising this if there weren't a windfall profit in it for them, which while not in and of itself conclusive evidence, strongly confirms the observation above, as does our previous experience as a country with such legislation which brought us to this point in the first place.