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Lobbying heavyweights will do battle this week in a legislative floor fight over Medicare and drug prices.
The participants include AARP, the powerful senior lobby, and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the powerful drug lobby. The senior group backs Democratic efforts to lift the prohibition on government involvement in price negotiations between drug-makers and Medicare Part D plans. PhRMA opposes the effort.
The Medicare bill is among the Senate Democratic leadership’s top priorities. House leaders already have adopted a similar bill as part of their “Six for ’06” agenda.
In the Senate, though, the bill is another early test of the ability of Democratic leaders to move legislation with only the slimmest of majorities.
After a day of debate, the Senate is expected to vote on cloture tomorrow. Since the November elections flipped control of Congress, those who support granting power to the federal government in drug price negotiations have worked to find the still-elusive 60 votes needed to end debate.
Senators in both parties have been under pressure from their respective leaders and from outside groups on this bill. The White House and Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, along with their allies on K Street, are trying to enforce party discipline on the Medicare vote while sending messages to those on the other side that their interests may not be the same as their party’s.
Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) garnered 54 votes in a test vote last year for a measure that would have established government negotiations of drug prices under Medicare.
The likely targets for this pressure are predictable: the 10 GOP senators who voted for the Snowe-Wyden bill last year; Republicans from Democratic-leaning states; and Democrats from Republican-leaning states.
A plethora of liberal groups are lined up in favor of the bill, but if any external force were to help the Democrats get to 60 votes, it would be the behemoth nonpartisan AARP.
AARP is running a parallel campaign in support of the bill. The senior citizens’ lobby has put lawmakers on notice that the AARP will take pains to ensure voters know who opposed the bill, which is one of the group’s marquee issues.
Drug companies, led by PhRMA, are pushing just as hard from the other side.
PhRMA’s efforts complement those of the White House and the Senate GOP leadership, which is trying to prevent Democrats from picking off the handful of Republicans they need to move the bill forward.
After months of lobbying, advertising, outreach and mobilization, these two groups started the week as uncertain about the result as the congressional leadership.
“We’re not going to know until Wednesday or Thursday,” AARP spokesman Drew Nannis said.
“In the end, this is going to be a political vote,” PhRMA Senior Vice President Ken Johnson said.
Proponents of the measure maintain that denying the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the ability to leverage the buying power of the more than 40 million people on Medicare flies in the face of common sense.
Opponents say the private companies administering Part D already have driven down drug prices and point to several analyses by the Congressional Budget Office that concluded the government could do no better.
The House passed a similar bill in January, but some seek to go further than Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) wanted to with his bill. The House bill would require HHS to step into the drug-pricing process, while the Baucus bill on the Senate floor merely permits it.
This crucial difference between the Baucus bill and the House-passed bill means, among other things, that the lobbying won’t end any time soon. There’s always conference committee.
Also on Capitol Hill this week: The debate over patent reform starts again with the reintroduction of a sweeping reform bill by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee.
Drug-makers are involved in this fight, too, this time facing high-tech companies like Microsoft and Dell Computers that have formed the Coalition for Patent Fairness.
A third group joins the fray this year, the Innovation Alliance. Led by Qualcomm, the group advocates for less-dramatic reforms than pushed for by the Coalition for Patent Fairness.
Instead, the alliance argues that much of the problem relating to litigation fights over patents could be resolved by fully funding the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
That way, government officials would be better able to review patents at the start of the process, lessening the likelihood of court challenges down the road.
“The American patent system is by no means perfect, but is seen as the gold standard globally,” a lobbyist at Qualcomm, Sean Murphy, said.
In particular, the group opposes the creation of a panel to review patents after they have been issued. The aim is to give an option other than the court system to weigh disputes.
Alliance members believe the approach could further delay resolution and add the costs to the patent system.
One lobbyist for a high-tech trade group, who requested anonymity because he hadn’t been authorized to talk to the press, said, however, that an “overwhelming number of high-tech companies support sweeping patent reform in two areas: litigation reform and patent-quality reform.”Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Texas Instruments and Corning as members of the Innovation Alliance. |
