When Pallone was ranking member on Energy and Commerce, pharma gave nearly $250,000 to his campaign for the 2018 cycle. That compares to roughly $414,000 he raised from other health professional groups.
Neal’s donations were even higher. Last cycle he raised more than $282,000 from the drug industry. That’s in comparison to more than $381,000 from insurers, according to OpenSecrets.
For context, the former GOP chairs of these same committees were top recipients of pharmaceutical money in the 2018 election cycle, according to an analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics, which operates the OpenSecrets website. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), then leader of Energy and Commerce, ranked first for pharma contributions to House lawmakers last year, while Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), former chair of Ways and Means, came in fourth.
These are the easy-to-track contributions. There’s also so-called dark money, which is funneled through 501(c) organizations and used to advocate policy along ideological arguments.
This boosts issues-focused groups to lobby Republicans in Congress against some of the administration’s ideas, notably the international reference-pricing model for Medicare Part B.
The top 501(c) recipients of PhRMA money included the American Conservative Union, an organization that has been
out front in opposition to the reference-pricing proposal.
Last year PhRMA also gave $1.5 million to the American Action Network—a group that in 2016 spent $2.6 million on an issues campaign against a Medicare Part D negotiation policy.
Conservative groups are also arguing against ideas like personal importation—bringing $10 insulin back from Hungary, for instance—which Senate Finance Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, a Republican, has supported.
The other side of the aisle raked in big bucks too: $1.19 million of PhRMA’s contributions went to Center Forward, a group that spent $1.3 million on Democrats for the 2018 midterms. Among the top recipients for Center Forward were the two moderate Democratic House political action committees—the Blue Dogs and the New Democrat Coalition.
Members of these groups are more sensitive than other Democrats to arguments about “price fixing,” and they also have more power in numbers now. The New Democrat Coalition got an enormous boost in the 2018 midterms, as Democrats took the House through swing districts nabbed by moderates.
The other critical influence on how the final drug-pricing legislation will turn out has less to do with money, but is arguably more pressing: the calendar. Grassley said he wants the Senate package wrapped up by June or July, given all that Congress needs to address before the fall—like the debt limit.
So far, House committees have approved uncontroversial measures like , a and the Creates Act, all of which are expected to go to the House floor. Democrats in particular want to go much bigger, yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has yet to disclose the “flagship” bill that would allow Medicare to negotiate prices in Part D.
In the vacuum of other Medicare negotiation proposals, progressives in the House have and plan to take their advocacy for his idea nationwide through Facebook Live town halls. But the idea likely won’t gain traction since it affects the U.S. patent system so drastically, and committee Republicans have made it clear they would never support it.
This leaves other Democrats hanging, and the conversations about hard-line policy have remained vague.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), a leading member of the Blue Dogs and the New Democrat Coalition, said he thinks people want Congress to do something beyond low-hanging fruit, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what that is.
Eshoo was also noncommittal. “I think it’s important to explore all avenues to lower drug prices,” she said, when asked for her view on a policy like arbitration. “I don’t think that lowering drug prices is done by one action.”
For all the industry influence and time constraints, there’s one more pressure point: 2020. Democrats want to defend their House majority and Republicans have a lot of Senate seats up for a challenge, not to mention the presidency.
“Republicans and Democrats have got to deliver for the American people on lower prescription drug prices, period,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said. “You hear about the cost of insulin wherever you go, from the children to the seniors. So instead of everybody pitting us against each other, we’ve got to find a way to deliver for the people who elected us, or everyone’s in trouble.”
