Remember in 2024 when Democrats pulled Coma Joe from the ticket and wedged Kamala WordSalad in without a real vote, and then progressive libs, NeverTrumps, the MSM, and corporate idjits by the cocktail party-ful (but I repeat myself) all pretended at rapture and joined forces trying to convince Americans that Day Drinking is the new Dementia, but in a good way?
Yeah, I try not to think back on it too often either. But let’s do it anyway, because fast-forward to today and one of those big corporate names is now trying to destroy health care in red states. Gee, wonder why they’d do that? They’re usually such a reasonable crowd amirite??
So Eli Lilly, whose employees donated about five times as much to Harris as they did to Trump, is refusing to sell drugs at a federally-mandated discount to hospitals that disproportionately serve rural, red state, working class voters unless those same hospitals spend loads of time filling out forms and doing a bunch of bureaucratic make-work that Lilly claims simply must be done in order for the company to be sure it’s only giving out the bare minimum in discounts required by federal law.
Lilly doesn’t like that giving out the discounts in the first place affects their bottom line (nevermind that in exchange for doing it they get to bill Medicare and Medicaid for drug sales, guaranteeing them massive government-arraneged profits).
And nevermind that one of the drugs they’re trying to sell at full price, with no discount, is one that loads of people need solely because of a side effect of the COVID vaccine that Lilly pals Biden and Harris mandated people get. (That would be Taltz, a monoclonal antibody for plaque psoriasis and other inflammatory conditions with a list price of $7,624.59 per injection; research has flagged a possible link between COVID-19 vaccination and a spike in psoriasis diagnoses).
It’s a good gig if you can get it: force people into taking a medication by government fiat, charge them up the wazoo for a drug to fix the side effects of that medication, bill taxpayers up the wazoo for all your drugs… and then refuse to provide any discounts.
Here are some of the other drugs that Eli Lilly is refusing to sell to hospitals that don’t comply with its new, reams-of-paperwork-and-
• Verzenio (abemaciclib), used for advanced or metastatic breast cancer: $17,309.88 for a 28-day supply.
• Mounjaro (tirzepatide), the GLP-1 diabetes drug everyone’s heard of: $1,112.16 a month.
• Zepbound, same active ingredient as Mounjaro, approved for weight loss and sleep apnea: $1,086.37 a month.
Now, hospital groups are screaming that this is illegal and demanding that HHS step in. Trump has made lowering drug prices a signature issue of his second term and has already gone after Lilly in particular. The admin willnow get to decide whether one of Kamala’s favorite corporate benefactors gets to rewrite the rules for a program that helps keep rural hospitals alive.
You can’t help but think Eli Lilly and other outfits are playing the odds here. Taking actions like this that they hope will stand if, as they fervently hope, Democrats retake Congress in November and get back to doing Pharma’s bidding.
Oh and by the way: not for nothin’, but you don’t even have to like the discount program to see what kind of corruption is going on in this case.