Socialists love nothing more than an old-fashioned show trial. Witness Bernie Sanders’ announcement last week that he’ll subpoena the CEOs of drugmakers that have challenged the Inflation Reduction Act’s price controls.
It’s a rite of passage these days for CEOs to get hauled before Congress. But the purpose of Congressional hearings is to conduct oversight and inform legislation, not punish government opponents. The latter is what the Vermont Senator is doing as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Mr. Sanders last Thursday announced a committee vote on Jan. 31 to subpoena the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck to testify about the “outrageously high price of prescription drugs.” This would be the first time the committee subpoenas private individuals. Committee staff typically negotiate the terms of executive appearances with companies.
Mr. Sanders doesn’t want to negotiate, or conduct actual oversight. He wants to keelhaul the CEOs as punishment for suing the government. The CEOs don’t have particular knowledge about how their drugs are priced in foreign countries — the ostensible subject of Mr. Sanders’s hearing — but both companies have offered to send executives who do.
An attorney for J&J wrote in a Jan. 12 letter to Mr. Sanders that the company has tried to cooperate with the committee. However, “your staff and your public comments have indicated” that the hearing is intended to target “the companies that pursued litigation challenging certain aspects” of the IRA.
Conscripting the CEOs of select companies challenging the law “seems unlikely to be coincidental,” the letter says. “And it raises significant concerns that the hearing is intended as retribution for the companies’ decisions to exercise their rights to challenge a statute that inappropriately infringes on constitutionally protected freedoms.”
The two drugmakers argue in their lawsuits that the IRA exacts an uncompensated taking of their property. If a drugmaker refuses to sign an “agreement” to “negotiate” a drug’s price — or rejects what the government deems a “maximum fair price” — it must pay an excise tax that escalates to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenue. This is effectively extortion.
Their lawsuits also contend that the IRA violates their speech rights by compelling them to endorse the false narrative that they are participating in a “negotiation” that results in a “fair” price. Lower courts are expected to rule on the lawsuits in the coming months, and appeals could reach the Supreme Court. Is Mr. Sanders afraid the government will lose?
His plan to subpoena the CEOs is another display of unconstitutional government coercion, which the J&J letter argues would “exceed Congress’s authority under applicable Supreme Court precedent.” In Watkins v. U.S. (1957), the Court held that congressional investigations conducted solely “to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.”
It’s also rich that Mr. Sanders is trying to compel the CEOs’ public testimony while the Biden administration conducts its sham negotiations behind closed doors. The Health and Human Services Department has threatened drugmakers with antitrust litigation if they discuss their negotiations. As the left likes to say, democracy dies in darkness.
(9) comments
Bernie Sanders does good work. It's crazy that our tax money funds drug development, and then we get charged 100s, sometimes 1000s of times the cost of manufacturing said drugs.
Keep going Bernie. I feel that it is your duty and job to protect all Americans from greed and to make sure that when our tax dollars are invested in producing drugs and other products, that we the American people don't pay twice or more.
Mr. Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal are doing their job to protect the Green (Greed) and I don't mean our Climate.
Ignorant (uninformed) people like you D Gelbrech makes you as simple minded as hypocrite Bernie Sanders. Poor hypo Bernie has three homes which is three times as many homes as ONE family needs. I think it's too many and he should give two away for 20% of their value.
Ignorant (uninformed) people like you D Gilbrech most likely have no idea what it cost to bring a drug to market. Let me help you Mr. I, it takes approximately 12-15 years of testing and about 2.3 Billion of real dollars, not 3-4 months of NO testing which left millions of sick or dead young people because they were forced to take a vaccine that wasn't a vaccine, but rather a government mandated experiment and overreaction. In the end ignorant ( uninformed) people like Gilbrech & Bernie want a government which is over $34 trillion in debt to tell well run corporations how to run their businesses. This makes little to NO Sense
Wow, 4 insults in one sentence. Going for a record?
The reason drug companies in the US do so well and make so much money is that our government supports them. Said government should indeed be spending even more money on saving lives--the national debt is largely due to ridiculous levels of military spending, not to spending on medical research.
Westy - you may not be aware that the rest of the world is depending on the US pharmaceutical companies for research. Very little of that is taking place outside our borders because of cost. Yes, new drugs are expensive but what does the lay person know about the cost of its development? Let's look elsewhere in our government spending, including the military and the social welfare system that is fraught with never ending scandals and little oversight. It is all a matter of priorities and whose ox is being gored.
Mr./Ms. Not So Common, I am proud of showing my name in all my communications. Why aren't you?
Now I don't have any jealousy of Bernie owning 3 homes of which the value would not even equal one California home. His are probably much larger than ours.
I am proud to support a representative who thinks about people over money. I feel that all tax dollars should be used wisely to support the people. Our government should share in the profits from any business we subsidize, just like any shareholder. These profits should always go back to our Treasury to be used to build a greater and healthier planet.
Thank you for sharing my ignorance.
Perhaps you forgot your own socialist words. " it is our duty to protect ALL Americans from greed." Regardless of the value of each home, by definition, owning three homes is greed, unless two of the homes are rented below market value. Is your beloved Bernie doing this? NO, NO, and NO. Bernie was made rich by becoming a public servant or better yet, Bernie learned how to game the system he fought against. You, Mr. D Gilbrech can't try to escape from your ignorance and hypocrisy by worshiping Bernie and forgiving Bernie of his sins of greed. Please let me know when Bernie shares HIS profits and let us know how much goes back WILLINGLY TO THE government. And while you're at, please let the world or at least SMDJ readers know how YOU have shared your yearly profits and given back to the treasury. Please include hard copies of your tax returns since it's hard to believe a socialist like yourself would ever willingly give back
“Not so Common” starts off with some reasoned economic points, but then descends into almost rabid anti-COVID vax misinformation. I have read repeatedly from multiple sources that the significant majority of COVID deaths (still running very high compared to flu) are in the **unvaccinated.**
The government, the NIH specifically, mainly funds research under normal conditions, and the companies tend to do the bulk of the development/production work, but clearly during public health emergencies, the government also assisted with the latter by purchasing the vaccines and also helping with logistics (distribution) coordination.
To the best of my recollection, the pharmaceutical industry, despite incurring tremendous drug development costs **which they clearly need to recoup or else all drug research will immediately grind to a halt**, also has some of the highest profit margins of any industry. Thus **reasonable** people can have a reasonable discussion about whether or not the government should claw back some of those “excess” profits, particularly in cases where the NIH funded the relevant research.
Dirk also makes some decent points about the U.S. doing a lot of research for the rest of the world, but I should also note that a lot of pharmaceutical research also takes place in Europe, Japan, and increasingly, other parts of Asia.
This entire debate is analogous to the debate over how the government should tax. Conservatives generally look at taxation as a form of “theft” but then will argue that the government needs to provide for the “common defense” which can not be done without taxation. Liberals will argue that laissez-faire economic policies were refuted by the Great Depression and that the post-WWII boom was the result of business, government, and labor working better together than they had prior to the war. Both sides *can* make reasonable points, but these days unfortunately rational arguments are few and far between compared to the amount of insults and name-calling.
For this I thank “our Great President Trump” who, beginning with the 2016 Republican primary debates, helped our national political discourse descend to even lower lows than it had reached during some earlier administrations.
Mr. Kristofferson, how can we take you seriously when you start with an accusation of anti-COVID vax misinformation but can’t support it? What misinformation is Not So Common providing? Not So Common is absolutely correct that the COVID jab is not a vaccine because COVID jabs don’t vaccinate, as evidenced by jabbed individuals getting COVID, again and again. That fact is indisputable. We know anyone taking the COVID jab is a guinea pig. The FDA provided emergency use authorization which allowed the use of the human population as guinea pigs. Neither the FDA nor the CDC had any evidence from human studies on how well these jab juices worked when they released it. That is also indisputable. Your COVID “vax” misinformation calls into question any of your following points, even if they’re valid.
BTW, any comment on the 400+ private jets and commercial jets taken to the recent COP conference? You know, the conference where they dine on beef and enjoy air conditioned comfort while they tell everyone to save the world, meanwhile doing more than their part to add to global carbon emissions. Or are you still giving their hypocrisy a pass?
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