Drug Dealers: The White House buys Big Pharma’s silence

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Democrats are trying to explain opposition to ObamaCare as a sinister conspiracy controlled by the hidden hand of the health-care industry. Psychologists call this projection. Why bother with a new conspiracy when you’ve already clinched a secret deal with the President?

Part of the Obama health strategy has been to assiduously co-opt the key health “stakeholders,” primarily with the leverage that legislation was inevitable so they might as well negotiate. Doctors, hospitals, insurers and the drug makers bought it—or perhaps it is more accurate to say were bought. This week it emerged that the pharmaceutical industry’s supposedly voluntary peace offering to cut drug costs by $80 billion to help finance ObamaCare was an explicit quid pro quo in exchange for White House protection.

After the industry trade group PhRMA announced the plan in the Rose Garden in June, liberals on Capitol Hill promptly declared that they were “not bound” by it, as Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi repeatedly put it. If the industry could do Mr. Obama the favor of $80 billion, liberals wanted it to eat $100 billion in cuts, or $160 billion, or more.

“The President made the agreements he made,” Mrs. Pelosi said. “And maybe we’ll be limited by that. But maybe not.” Sure enough, the House health bill pockets the money and then imposes price controls in Medicare and other “rebates” from manufacturers, much like Medicaid requires now.

When you make a deal with the devil, you'll always be the junior partner.