Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via AP
Melting down a Gilded Age has never been easy. The great corporations of the first G.A.—rail, steel, oil—fiercely resisted those who sought to spread power and wealth to actual people during the Progressive Era, as their successors did with the coming of the New Deal. Today, our corporate overlords are at it again, with Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s all responding to the prospect that their workers might opt to go union by challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to bargain collectively. The NLRA has been on the books for 89 years, and was upheld by the Supreme Court 87 years ago.
No less extreme is the response of the pharmaceutical industry to the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that have enabled the Biden administration to negotiate with drug companies over the price Medicare pays for ten widely used prescription drugs—drugs that cost less virtually everywhere else on the planet save in these United States.
According to an article in today’s Washington Post, Bristol Myers Squibb, Janssen, Novartis, and Novo Nordisk have all gone to court to keep the administration from bringing down drug prices so that they’re closer to the level they’re at in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Canada. The article notes that the companies’ lawyers have argued that such action is unconstitutional “because it would force them to acknowledge in public that a lower price is a fairer one.”
A tear wells in the eye.
The druggies’ attorneys are almost certainly court-shopping—looking for a Republican judge who will stay the horror of more affordable medications. Partisan judgment is crucial here, as the Inflation Reduction Act got through Congress without a single Republican vote. By the same token, reducing these prices is an initiative that already is playing a major role in Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and in campaigns for Democratic House and Senate members. The more that the public understands the difference between D’s and R’s on this issue—and between Biden (who pledged last week to make 500, not just ten, drugs subject to such negotiations if re-elected) and Trump—the better the chances that Biden and the Dems will have a good Election Day come November.
Still, they and we (the current and future medication-takers of America) need to do more to get this contrast before a substantially news-impervious public. How about public demonstrations outside every courtroom where the drug companies are trying out their arguments? Or outside the drug companies’ corporate headquarters, or just plain hospitals, or parks? I can think of a large number of groups, starting with but going well beyond the AARP, that could be doing this, and state and local Democratic Parties should be out there, too. I don’t doubt that the airwaves (or whatever the social media equivalent of an airwave is) will be filled with Democratic commercials highlighting this issue in the fall, but right now, our side is coming up short on popular mobilizations that turn out and speak both to base and swing voters, to lefties and moderates alike. To paraphrase Hillel, if not this, what? And if not now, when?
