From Arianna Huffington at Huff Post:
[I]t's not like the drug industry somehow pulled a fast one on the president. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was unequivocal on the issue. Here are some of the flashback quotes we put together for HuffPost's Obama vs. Obama story:
-- "Congress exempted Medicare from being able to negotiate for the cheapest available price. And that was a profound mistake."
-- "We will break the stranglehold that a few big drug and insurance companies have on the health care market."
-- "We're not going to get change unless we can overcome the resistance the drug companies, the insurance companies, the HMOs, those who are making a major profit from the system currently."
And from his campaign documents:
Allow Medicare to negotiate for cheaper drug prices.... Barack Obama and Joe Biden will repeal the ban on direct negotiation with drug companies and use the resulting savings, which could be as high as $310 billion, to further invest in improving health care coverage and quality.
"We'll tell the pharmaceutical companies 'Thanks but no thanks for overpriced drugs,'" Obama said in October. "We'll let Medicare negotiate for lower prices." From now on shall we just assume that "thanks but no thanks" really means "thanks"?
Obama also promised to hold all negotiations on C-SPAN. He hasn't. Instead we've had a week of White House statements, followed by anonymous White House briefings, followed by contradictory anonymous White House briefings, accompanied by the PhRMA drug lobbyists touting their agreement, followed by the lobbyists issuing "no comment" comments on their agreement, followed by the lobbyists walking back their touting of their agreement.
