Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha Mclaughlin
Infrastructure passes now with limited corporation support, but increased big Pharma backlash causes it to fail
Waldman 8/31 Paul, opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Before joining The Post, he worked at an advocacy group, edited an online magazine, taught at university and worked on political campaigns. He has authored or co-authored four books on media and politics, and his work has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines. He is also a senior writer at the American Prospect, “Opinion: Democrats, don’t knuckle under to corporations on the reconciliation bill”, 08-31-2021, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/democrats-dont-knuckle-under-corporations-reconciliation-bill///pranav
The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate and awaits action in the House was in some ways a model of bipartisanship, supported by some Republicans as well as all the chamber’s Democrats, and given a boost from traditionally Republican business groups. That wasn’t a surprise; big corporations need infrastructure to do business. If the government pays for better roads, a more resilient electrical grid and wider availability of broadband, it’ll probably help the bottom line. But what happens when the government suggests addressing Americans’ needs and asks those corporations to help pay for it? This is what happens: A torrent of political groups representing some of the country’s most influential corporations — including ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company — is laying the groundwork for a massive lobbying blitz to stop Congress from enacting significant swaths of President Biden’s $3.5 trillion economic agenda. The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers and oil-and-gas giants. In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal health care, education and safety net programs. This campaign will have lots of behind-the-scenes pressure: Together, these companies employ a group of lobbyists that are approximately equal in number to China’s People’s Liberation Army — as well as online and TV ads coming to a screen near you. So Democrats should now ask themselves: What are we doing here? As in, why did we decide to run for Congress? Because there are some moments that test your resolve, in which you have to ask what the purpose of public service is, and whether it’s more than just staying in your job for as long as possible. There are disagreements among Democrats about what should be in the final bill, and it’s almost certain that these corporations will have some success in stripping away some provisions they find threatening. There’s an increase in the corporate tax rate (though under every proposal, it would still be less than before the 2017 Republican tax cut). There’s money to boost Internal Revenue Service enforcement of existing tax laws, which the people who run corporations don’t like; an overstretched, overworked IRS that can’t manage to audit the super-rich is just how CEOs like things. Perhaps most threatening is the proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs, as they are currently barred by law from doing. Democrats insist that change would pay for much of the trillions of dollars in new and beefed-up social programs this bill creates.
Big Pharma hates the plan – empirics – err neg our ev literally cites their press releases
PhRMA ’21 The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading innovative biopharmaceutical research companies, which are devoted to discovering and developing medicines that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Since 2000, PhRMA member companies have invested nearly $1 trillion in the search for new treatments and cures, including an estimated $83 billion in 2019 alone, “PhRMA Statement on WTO TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver”, 05-05-2021, https://www.phrma.org/coronavirus/phrma-statement-on-wto-trips-intellectual-property-waiver//pranav
WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 5, 2021) – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl made the following statement after the United States Trade Representative expressed support for a proposal to waive patent protections for COVID-19 medicines: “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. “This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives. It also flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery. This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials. These are the real challenges we face that this empty promise ignores. “In the past few days alone, we’ve seen more American vaccine exports, increased production targets from manufacturers, new commitments to COVAX and unprecedented aid for India during its devastating COVID-19 surge. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are fully committed to providing global access to COVID-19 vaccines, and they are collaborating at a scale that was previously unimaginable, including more than 200 manufacturing and other partnerships to date. The biopharmaceutical industry shares the goal to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, and we hope we can all re-focus on that shared objective.”
They lash out against infra and use COVID clout to kill it – they have public support, and a win now postpones reform indefinitely which turns case
Fuchs et al. 09/02 Hailey Fuchs attended Yale University and was an inaugural Bradlee Fellow for The Washington Post, where she reported on national politics, Alice Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and politics for Talking Points Memo, Megan Wilson is a health care and influence reporter at POLITICO, “Drug industry banks on its Covid clout to halt Dems’ push on prices”, 09-02-2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/02/drug-prices-democrats-lobbying-508127//pranav
As Democrats prepare a massive overhaul of prescription drug policy, major pharmaceutical companies are mounting a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that the effort could undermine a Covid fight likely to last far longer than originally expected. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings. In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus. “For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won’t suffer any harm,” said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, in a statement. “But in countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines. Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.” The escalating warnings from the pharmaceutical industry are part of what is expected to be one of the more dramatic and expensive lobbying fights in recent memory, and a heightened repeat of the industry’s pushback to actions by former President Donald Trump to target drug prices. The proposal now under consideration in Democrats’ reconciliation package could save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars by leveraging its ability to purchase prescription drugs, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Without those funds, Democrats won’t be able to pay for the rest of the health care agenda they’ve promised to voters, including expansions of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. But the plan has political power as more than a revenue raiser. Party leaders — from President Joe Biden to Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are touting it as one of the most important components of the $3.5 trillion package, with the potential to lower out-of-pocket health spending for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Outside advocates have also zeroed in on it as the most consequential policy fight on the horizon. “This is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it’s very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “This is Armageddon for pharma.” Progressive Democrats and their outside allies believe they’re closer than they’ve been in decades to imposing some price controls, and worry that failure to do so this year will delay progress indefinitely given the possibility of the party losing one or more chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms. In April, the House passed a fairly aggressive version — H.R. 3 (117) — though a handful of moderate Democrats friendly to the industry have threatened to block it when it comes back to the floor for a vote later this fall. Leadership has largely shrugged off this threat, banking on the fact that the most vulnerable frontline Democrats are vocally in favor of the policy, while most of the dissenters sit in safe blue districts. The Senate is designing its own version, outlined by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in June, as a middle ground between HR3 and the more narrow, bipartisan bill he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last Congress. A senior Senate Democratic aide confirmed to POLITICO that the bill is nearly complete and that they’re in the process of shopping it around to undecided senators to make sure it has enough support to move forward in the 50-50 upper chamber. “It makes sense to get buy-in before releasing it rather than releasing it with fingers crossed and then tweaking it once members complain,” the aide said. But the reform push is coming at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is working hand-in-hand with government officials to combat the pandemic and enjoying a boost in public opinion as a result, even as drug costs continue to rise. The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture. With the final draft of the bill expected in the coming weeks, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is taking its case public. The group has recently spent at least seven figures on ads pressuring Congress not to change Medicare drug policy.
Big pharma always wins – independently kills aff solvency bc it causes the plan to be watered down so much that de facto monopolies can survive
Florko and Facher ‘19 Nicholas Florko is a Stat News Washington correspondent and Lev Facher is Stat News health and life sciences writer, “How pharma, under attack from all sides, keeps winning in Washington”, 07-16-2019, Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/16/pharma-still-winning///pranav
It does not seem to matter how angrily President Trump tweets, how pointedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lobs a critique, or how shrewdly health secretary Alex Azar drafts a regulatory change. The pharmaceutical industry is still winning in Washington. In the past month alone, drug makers and the army of lobbyists they employ pressured a Republican senator not to push forward a bill that would have limited some of their intellectual property rights, according to lobbyists and industry representatives. They managed to water down another before it was added to a legislative package aimed at lowering health care costs. Lobbyists also convinced yet another GOP lawmaker — once bombastically opposed to the industry’s patent tactics — to publicly commit to softening his own legislation on the topic, as STAT reported last month. Even off Capitol Hill, they found a way to block perhaps the Trump administration’s most substantial anti-industry accomplishment in the past two years: a rule that would have required drug companies to list their prices in television ads. To pick their way through the policy minefield, drug makers have successfully deployed dozens of lobbyists and devoted record-breaking sums to their federal advocacy efforts. But there is also a seemingly new strategy in play: industry CEOs have targeted their campaign donations this year on a pair of vulnerable Republican lawmakers — and then called on them not to upend the industry’s business model. In more than a dozen interviews by STAT with an array of industry employees, Capitol Hill staff, lobbyists, policy analysts, and advocates for lower drug prices, however, an unmistakable disconnect emerges. Even though Washington has stepped up its rhetorical attacks on the industry, and focused its policymaking efforts on reining in high drug prices, the pharmaceutical industry’s time-honored lobbying and advocacy strategies have kept both lawmakers and the Trump administration from landing any of their prescription-drug punches. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement to STAT. Durbin, who recently saw the industry successfully oppose his proposal to curtail some of the industry’s patent maneuvering, added that, “Pharma’s billions allow them to continue to rip off American families and taxpayers.” The industry doesn’t get all the credit; it has also benefited from a fractured Congress and discord between President Trump’s most senior health care advisers. PhRMA, the drug industry’s largest lobbying group here, declined to comment for this article. But industry leaders have broadly argued against efforts to rein in the industry’s practices in terms of price hikes and patents, making the case that that could irreparably stifle medical innovation. The battle is far from over, and industry representatives and lobbyists are quick to hypothesize that the worst, for them, is yet to come. They point to several ongoing legislative initiatives, including in the Senate Finance Committee, that could take more concerted direct aim at their pricing strategies in Medicare. They’re waiting, too, to see if House Democrats can cut a drug pricing deal with the White House to empower Medicare to negotiate at least some drug prices. Another pending regulation, loathed by drug makers, might tie their pricing decisions in Medicare to an index of international prices. They’ve also bemoaned the Trump administration’s decision last week to abandon a policy change that would have ended drug rebates — which, the pharmaceutical industry has said, could have given drug makers more space to lower their prices voluntarily. “We’re getting killed!” one pharma lobbyist told STAT. Of course, the Trump administration’s supposedly devastating decision to abandon that proposal simply maintains the status quo. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers.” n Valentine’s Day, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) enjoyed a showering of love that is familiar in Washington: a flood of campaign contributions, many at the federal limit of $2,800 for a candidate or $5,000 for an affiliated political committee. One donation came from Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, who donated $5,000 to Tillis and another $10,000 to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and associated campaign committees. Another came from Kenneth Frazier, the top executive at Merck. The Tillis campaign committee eventually cashed checks from CEOs and other high-ranking executives at those companies as well as Amgen, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Bristol Myers-Squibb, plus two high-ranking officials at the advocacy group PhRMA. Six lobbyists at one firm that works with PhRMA, BGR, also combined to contribute $100,000 to a bevy of Republican lawmakers and the party’s campaign arms. Tillis raised an additional $64,500 from drug industry political action committees in the past quarter, according to disclosures released on Monday. A Pfizer spokeswoman declined to comment about Bourla’s contributions, and representatives for the other companies did not respond to STAT’s request for comment. Tills was one of few individual lawmakers — in many cases, the only one — to whom the executives had written personal checks during the current election cycle. While drug industry CEOs frequently contribute to political committees for congressional leadership, the breadth of executives who donated Tillis specifically is notable, particularly considering his outspoken role on pharmaceutical industry issues. While lobbyists pushed back on the notion that campaign contributions directly influence votes, the donations targeted so specifically to a particular candidate could be seen as a prime example of Washington’s system for rewarding loyalty and how industries protect their interests. The same PhRMA PAC that donated to Tillis has given generously in recent years: nearly $200,000 in the 2018 campaign cycle, roughly 58 of which was targeted toward Republicans. Drug industry PACs donated $10.3 million in total in that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The figure two years before was even higher: a total of $12.2 million from industry-aligned PACs alone. It is no accident that the pharmaceutical industry has maintained its reputation among the nation’s most powerful lobbies, said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks political influence. “Their access and influence goes beyond this Congress or even the administration,” Krumholz said in an interview, adding that she “was struggling to think of evidence” it had waned. Pharma has a reputation here for winning on policy — often thanks to the lawmakers who are among the biggest recipients of the millions that drug corporations, employees, and the industry political arms donate each year. Even as the rhetoric has escalated, the industry has quietly worked to insulate itself from any major legislative changes. Take, for example, a recent about-face from Cornyn, the Texas Republican who took in some campaign cash alongside Tillis. As recently as February, Cornyn seemed to be positioning himself as a rare Republican figurehead for anti-pharma congressional wrath. At a widely publicized hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he went head-to-head with AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez, pressing him to explain why the company had filed more than 100 patents on its blockbuster arthritis drug Humira. Cornyn introduced legislation soon after the skirmish to crack down on patent “thicketing,” a term for a drug company tactic to accumulate tens, if not hundreds, of patents to shield a drug from potential generic competition. Pharma sprung into action. They recruited congressional allies, including Tillis, to pressure Cornyn to significantly rework the bill, and they succeeded. The version of the bill that eventually cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee was stripped of language that would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to go after patent thicketing. Instead, the bill limited how many patents a drug maker could assert in a patent lawsuit. The new version of the bill lost “a lot of teeth” and “solves a narrower problem in a narrow way,” advocates told STAT when the change was first introduced. It is far from the only example of the industry’s aggressive interventions to water down legislation. “In lots of ways they’re like the National Rifle Association, because they have an incredible power to squash out any negative opinion, nor to feel any of the ill effects of those things,” said Pallavi Damani Kumar, an American University crisis communications professor who once worked in media relations for drug manufacturers. “It just speaks to how incredibly savvy they are.” Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists also successfully fought to keep another anti-drug industry patent proposal from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) out of a bipartisan drug pricing package moving through the Senate HELP Committee. The legislation would have allowed the FDA to approve cheaper versions of drugs, even when the more expensive product was protected by certain patents. Cassidy’s proposal never even made it into the HELP package. As the lobbyist who bemoaned the withdrawal of the rebate rule put it, Cassidy “simmered down” in the face of industry pressure. In recent weeks, the industry had targeted Cassidy in particular, in recent weeks, for fear he would break with many of his GOP colleagues to support a cap on some price hikes for drugs purchased under Medicare, a proposal so far pushed only by Democrats. “Sen. Cassidy doesn’t care what lobbyists think — he is going to do what’s best for patients,” said Ty Bofferding, a Cassidy spokesman. “Sen. Cassidy fought for the committee to include the REMEDY Act in the package, despite strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.” The committee eventually included half the bill’s provisions, he added, as well as four other pieces of legislation meant to prevent the industry from taking advantage of the patent system. The drug industry also notched a win by watering down another proposal in that package from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would have blocked drug makers from suing over patents they didn’t disclose to the FDA. The version of the bill that actually made it into the package doesn’t block drug makers from suing, but instead directs the FDA to create a public list of companies that fail to disclose their patents. “This change is a big win for drug makers,” Michael Carrier, a Rutgers University professor and expert on patent gaming, told STAT. “Shaming is something drug makers don’t seem worried about.” Matthew Lane, the executive director of the Coalition Against Patent Abuse, likewise added that the altered bill “doesn’t seem to be doing much anymore.” Not all of the pharma-endorsed changes, however, are self-serving. Patent experts and federal regulators too had raised concerns with some of the bill being proposed. Cornyn’s patent bill was particularly controversial. “These provisions encourage ‘fishing expeditions’ by zealous bureaucrats, politically motivated by the popularity of efforts to reduce drug prices and garner the political benefits of being seen to be pursuing these ends,” Kevin Noonan, a patent lawyer at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert and Berghoff wrote in a recent blog post, referring to the original Cornyn bill. Drug-pricing advocates said lobbyists have even managed to convince lawmakers to introduce some legislation they say has explicitly favored the drug industry, including intellectual property-focused legislation that would allow drug makers to patent human genes. That particular bill would “undo the bipartisan effort underway to fix pharma’s exploitation of the patent system,” said the Coalition Against Patent Abuse. And they were far from the only group raising concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 150 other groups wrote to lawmakers last month opposing the bill. Pharma’s list of policy victories goes on: Drug companies and allied patient groups forced the Trump administration to back off a proposal to make relatively minor changes to Medicare’s so-called protected classes policy. Currently, Medicare is required to cover all drugs for certain conditions, including depression and HIV. The Trump administration proposed in November that private Medicare plans should be able to remove certain drugs in those classes from their formularies, if the drugs were just new formulations of a cheaper, older version of the same drug, or when a drug spiked in price. But drug industry opposition helped convince the administration to spike that effort. A week ago, the industry struck its biggest blow yet. Three of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies —Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck — prevailed in a lawsuit to strike down a Trump administration requirement that they disclose list prices in television advertisements. The lack of congressional action — despite the Democratic enthusiasm and bipartisan appetite — is still further evidence of industry’s ability to stave off defeat. As the dozens of Democrats running for president ramp up their anti-pharma rhetoric, both Trump and progressives have begun to fret that Washington’s efforts have proven to be all bark and no bite. With two weeks remaining before the August recess and an escalating 2020 campaign, some advocates fear that the window for bold action is closing quickly. “It’s appalling that we are six months into this Congress and we haven’t seen meaningful legislation passed on American’s number one issue for this congress,” said Peter Maybarduk, who leads drug-pricing initiatives for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “Congress needs to get its act together.”
Infra’s k2 stopping existential climate change – warming is incremental and every change in temperature is vital
Higgins 8/16 Trevor, Senior Director, Domestic Climate and Energy, “Budget Reconciliation Is the Key to Stopping Climate Change”, 08-16-2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/08/16/502681/budget-reconciliation-key-stopping-climate-change///pranav
The United States is suffering acutely from the chaotic changes in climate that scientists now directly attribute to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. The drought, fires, extreme heat, and floods that have already killed hundreds this summer across the continent and around the world are a tragedy—and a warning of worsening instability yet to come. However, this week, the Senate initiated an extraordinary legislative response that would set the world on a different path. Enacting the full scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would put the American economy to work leading a global transition to clean energy and stabilizing the climate. A look at what’s coming next through the budget reconciliation process reveals a ray of hope that is easy to miss amid the fitful negotiations of recent months: At long last, Congress is on the verge of major legislation that would build a more equitable, just, and inclusive clean energy economy. This is our shot to stop climate change. Building a clean energy future must start now Until the global economy stops polluting the air and instead starts to draw down the emissions of years past, the world will continue to heat up, blundering past perilous tipping points that threaten irreversible and catastrophic consequences. Stemming the extent of warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather 2 degrees or worse will reduce the risk of crossing such tipping points or otherwise exceeding the adaptive capacity of human society. Every degree matters. Stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius starts with cutting annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to half of peak levels by 2030. This isn’t about temporary offsets or incremental gains in efficiency—it’s about the rapid adoption of scalable solutions that will work throughout the world to eliminate global net emissions by 2050 and sustain net-negative emissions thereafter. Building this better future will tackle climate change, deliver on environmental justice, and create good jobs. It will give us a shot to stop the planet from continuously warming. It will alleviate the concentrated burdens of fossil fuel pollution, which are concentrated in systemically disadvantaged, often majority Black and brown communities. It will empower American workers to compete in the global clean energy economy of the 21st century. There is no time to lose in the work of building a clean energy future.