The Deceptive Trump, UAE-Israel ‘Peace Deal’

Among the most brutal realities for Palestinians is loss of support from Arab states, who pay lip service to their own populations, while drawing closer to Israel with economic interests and Iran in mind.

August 16, 2020 Medea Benjamin, Ariel Gold (Consortium News) Jennifer Hansler, Richard Roth

https://portside.org/2020-08-16/deceptive-trump-uae-israel-peace-deal

The Deceptive Trump, UAE-Israel ‘Peace Deal’

Medea Benjamin, Ariel Gold
August 14, 2020
Consortium News
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/14/the-deceptive-trump-uae-israel-peace-deal/

Huge breakthrough today,” crowed Donald Trump on twitter as he announced the new peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The deal makes the UAE the first Gulf Arab state and the third Arab nation, after Egypt and Jordan, to have diplomatic ties with Israel. But the new Israel-UAE partnership should fool no one.

Though it will supposedly stave off Israeli annexation of the West Bank and encourage tourism and trade between both countries, in reality, it is nothing more than a scheme to give an Arab stamp of approval to Israel’s status quo of land theft, home demolitions, arbitrary extrajudicial killings, apartheid laws, and other abuses of Palestinian rights.

The deal should be seen in the context of over three years of Trump administration policies that have tightened Israel’s grip on the Palestinians: moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, and creating a so-called peace plan with no Palestinian participation or input.

While no U.S. administration has successfully brokered a resolution to Israel’s now 53-year-long occupation, the Trump years have been especially detrimental to the Palestinian cause. Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi wrote on Twitter that with this deal, “Israel got rewarded for not declaring openly what it’s been doing to Palestine illegally & persistently since the beginning of the occupation.”

Indeed, with Donald Trump at the helm and son-in-law Jared Kushner as the primary strategist, even concessions for Palestinians have been done away with. To add insult to injury, while the deal had been couched in terms of a commitment by Israel to suspend annexation of Palestinian territories, in his Israeli press conference announcing the deal, Netanyahu said annexation was “still on the table” and that it was something he is “committed to.”


UAE in ‘Enemy Camp’

Among the most brutal aspects of this period for Palestinians have been the loss of support for their cause in neighboring Arab states. The Arab political party in Israel, Balad, said that by signing this pact, “the UAE has officially joined Israel against Palestine, and placed itself in the camp of the enemies of the Palestinian people.”

The UAE has previously held a position consistent with public opinion in Gulf and Middle East countries that the acceptance of formal diplomatic relations with Israel should only take place in exchange for a just peace and in accordance with international law. Back in June, Emirati ambassador to the U.S. Yousef al-Otaiba penned an an op-ed in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, the Israeli equivalent to USA Today, appealing directly in Hebrew for Israel not to annex the West Bank.

However, by working out an agreement with Trump and Netanyahu to normalize relations, the country has now made itself Israel’s partner in cementing de facto annexation and ongoing apartheid.

The UAE’s change from supporting Palestinian dignity and freedom to supporting Israel’s never-ending occupation is a calculated move by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, a shrewd Middle East dictator who uses his country’s military and financial resources to thwart moves towards democracy and respect for human rights under the guise of fighting Islamic terrorism. His support for Israel cements his relationship with the Trump administration.

Trump has already gone out of his way to push billions of dollars in arms sales to the UAE, despite opposition from Congress because of high number of civilian casualties associated with the use of those weapons in Yemen.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also defended the UAE from credible reports that U.S. weapons sold to the UAE have been transferred in Yemen to groups linked to Al Qaeda, hardline Salafi militias and Yemeni separatists. The UAE was also stung by revelations of secret prisons it had been operating in Yemen where prisoners were subjected to horrific forms of torture, including “the grill,” where victims were “tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire.”

In Libya, the UAE has been criticized for violating a 2011 UN Security Council arms embargo by supplying combat equipment to the LAAF, the armed group commanded by General Khalifa Haftar with a well-established record of human right abuses. So this deal with Israel gives the UAE a much-needed veneer of respectability.


But it is impossible to understand the impetus for this deal without putting it in the context of the ongoing hostilities between all three countries and Iran. Following the old adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” in recent years Israel has been negotiating with various Gulf states, including the UAE, to push back against Iran’s growing influence in the region.

As the communique announcing the Israeli-UAE deal asserted, the U.S., Israel and the UAE “share a similar outlook regarding threats in the region.” This dovetails with Trump’s anti-Iran obsession, which includes withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and his “maximum pressure” campaign designed to force Iran back to the negotiating table to make a “better deal.”

In announcing the UAE-Israeli pact, Trump declared with ridiculous bravado that if he wins the elections, he’ll have a new deal with Iran within 30 days. Anyone who believes this must be almost as delusional as Trump.

Biden Boasts

The fact that this agreement between two Middle East countries was first announced thousands of miles away in Washington DC shows how it is more about shoring up Trump’s slumping electoral campaign and improving Netanyahu’s battered image in Israel than bringing peace to the Middle East. It also shows that Netanyahu and bin Zayed have a stake in seeing Trump win a second term in the White House.

Instead of pointing out the hollowness of the pact, Joe Biden’s response was unfortunately to congratulate Israel and the UAE and try to take credit for the deal. “I personally spent time with leaders of both Israel and the U.A.E. during our administration, building the case for cooperation and broader engagement,” he said. “I am gratified by today’s announcement.”

The normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel, facilitated by the U.S., serves to prop up three repressive leaders — Trump, Netanyahu, and bin Zayed — and will cause further harm to Palestinians. It is both a shame and a sham.

Making Billions v Making Ends Meet: How the Pandemic Has Split the US Economy in Two

US billionaires’ wealth is soaring while millions remain unemployed, creating a country with two economies and increased inequality

August 16, 2020 Dominic Rushe THE GUARDIAN

https://portside.org/2020-08-16/making-billions-v-making-ends-meet-how-pandemic-has-split-us-economy-two

It’s only a hundred miles from Manhattan to East Hampton but as the city swelters the Long Island town can seem a world away. Cool Atlantic breezes take the heat off long summer days spent on its miles of white, soft sand beaches. High-priced farm stands provide heirloom tomatoes, peaches and arugula to summer visitors and the mansions of the financial titans and the celebrities, including Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Julianne Moore and Robert Downey Jr, who summer there.

Nor does the coronavirus pandemic seem to have dampened the 1%’s enthusiasm for the Hamptons.

If anything, quite the opposite. House prices are soaring. High-priced rentals have all been snapped up. It took developer Joe Farrell just one day to rent Sandcastle, his 15-bedroom mansion with sunken tennis courts, for $2m for the summer to “a textile tycoon and his family who were stuck in Manhattan and wanted to leave the city on a day’s notice. This was a Covid situation – not a normal summer rental”, he told the New York Post.

The Hamptons really is a world away for Sara Fearrington. It may as well be another planet. The 43-year-old lost her job at Waffle House in Durham, North Carolina, when the pandemic struck. Now she, her husband and their six children are trying to make ends meet on $125 in unemployment benefits each week. Fearrington is one of the 2.6 million people to have lost her job in the food services and drinking industry since February.

The Fearringtons had been receiving an extra $600 a week in benefits thanks to an emergency lifeline set up by Congress in March. That expired at the end of July and Washington is deadlocked over a replacement. “Now we literally have to sit here and wait, your head on a chopping block,” she said.

Once again coronavirus has shown that it is far more deadly for those suffering from pre-existing conditions. For the US body politic that pre-existing condition is inequality.

Stock markets are setting new highs driven by soaring prices for the tech companies that enable those lucky enough to work from home. Apple is close to being valued at $2tn. The total wealth of US billionaires has soared $685bn since the middle of March to a combined $3.65tn. Rock-bottom interest rates have triggered a home sales boom for some as those with the money reconsider their priorities in the work-from-home era. With nowhere to go, those Americans who can are saving at record rates.

But only one in four Americans can work from home. Meanwhile roughly 30 million people are unemployed in the US, about 20% of the workforce. Almost 30 million Americans recently reported that they have not had enough to eat at some point in the previous seven days, according to the Census Bureau. The vast majority – about 26 million – had lower rates of educational attainment.

The recession has also further exposed the racial wealth gap. The job market ticked up again last month but 14.6% of Black and 12.9% of Latinx adults were unemployed in July, versus 9.2% of whites.

“It’s white-collar professionals who are able to work from home. In some ways, this is a sign that the economy is just officially split in two,” Glenn Kelman, chief executive of property company Redfin, told NPR last week.

“We are all in this together” may be the rallying cry for the pandemic but the truth is the poor, and particularly people of color, have been devastated by coronavirus and its attendant recession while the wealthy have weathered it and in some cases made huge gains. Research into previous recent pandemics from economists at the International Monetary Fund suggests it’s a trend that may continue even after the outbreak abates.

Economists often talk of V-shaped economic recoveries, a sharp drop and an equally sharp bounce back. Sometimes the economy drags along the bottom before bouncing back – a U-shaped recovery. Now there is talk of a “K-shaped” recovery. A fall followed by a split where the well off and well educated tick up while the poor and poorly educated fall further behind.

For people able to work from home, “life has returned largely to normal”, said Peter Atwater, adjunct lecturer in the economics department at William & Mary. “In fact, the wealthiest today are even richer than they were before the outbreak.”

For those people, on the arm of the K, Atwater said it’s “almost as if the outbreak never happened. That’s starkly different for people on the leg. If you are a small business person, work in the service industry, had to go back out into a manufacturing facility, a job in the ‘real world’, as it were, that has weighed heavily. Sadly it has weighed particularly heavily on minority communities at a time when they are the largest populations experiencing the outbreak. It’s a stacked inequity.”

In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death Prince Prospero and the knights and dames of his court retire to “the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys” to escape the Red Death, a plague that is devastating the country around them.

Amply provisioned and, so they think, sealed off from the outside world, Prospero and his pod put on a masqued ball but the prince is angered to find that one of the guests has dressed as Red Death.

Prospero chases the guest from room to room, only to realize the figure is the Red Death personified. The guests sicken and die: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

Inequality was a pre-existing condition for the US economy long before the coronavirus started its spread. For Fearrington the pandemic has merely exposed its “ugly face”. But she is certain that if this goes on much longer today’s Prosperos too will see that face.

A Fight for $15 activist campaigning for a rise in the national minimum wage, Fearrington is hopeful that as so many people come to realize how bad the situation has become, something will change. “What we have right now is economic failure,” she said.

“My husband is black. We are a mixed family that is living through this struggle. It is not a fun place to be. I have been with my husband for 28 years. Twenty-eight years and I am still seeing the same problems? No. We have got to speak up. I have had enough.”

She has seen the reports of people snapping up second homes. “I have dreams of that too,” she said. “I am happy for people who have that. I want everybody to prosper. But at the same time I feel left behind. Some of my dreams are now halted.” She said “every little bit of savings” she had stowed away has gone “just to keep our heads above water”.

Even before Covid-19 life was hard for Fearrington. She worked 42-72 hours a week, taking all the shifts she could get. “Every holiday. Every one of my kids’ birthdays, I was working.” Paid $3.15 an hour before tips she could make $40-$70 a day. The family needed every dollar. Medical costs are a constant fear. Her husband has a rare lung disease, ABPA. His inhalers can cost $300. One stay in hospital left the family with a bill for $15,000. “If you get sick, too bad, so sad,” she said.

“We need healthcare for all,” she said. “A lot of things have to change, we need to learn to live together. Just because we fall in a certain pay bracket doesn’t mean our lives are less valuable than anybody else’s.”

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for $15, #MeToo and Occupy Wall Street are all recent examples of powerful, popular movements demanding real change. The continuing protests across America following the killing of George Floyd and the fact that more white people too are joining those protests gives her hope. “Now is a time when people are recognising that silence has not worked. We are coming together. Ugliness has to stop,” she said.

Without change there will be more outrage, said Atwater. “I don’t think the wealthy appreciate how vulnerable they are to those who are out in the real world. They are not immune to the world around them.”

The US economy is driven by the consumer. About 70% of economic growth is dependent on consumer spending. The longer this slowdown continues, the more likely that drain on growth will creep up the income ladder. The last recession started at the top with Lehman Brothers bankers walking away with boxes of their belongings as the financial crisis bit. It soon trickled down. This may have started in Waffle House but it doesn’t mean it won’t trickle up.

If the current situation continues, “there is a very real risk that companies will start looking at their balance sheets and thinking, ‘Actually, we really need to trim our workforce’, and that could happen across the board. That’s not just confined to leisure and hospitality,” said John Payne, economist at Oxford Economics.

Widening job losses and increasing inequality is likely to lead to louder calls for change.

“We talk about the American dream, the ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Rags to riches. All this American mythology is being challenged by this extraordinary wealth divide,” said Atwater. “The rubber band has been pulled too far. People are uncomfortable with how divided we have become.

“At the same time I don’t think the wealthy appreciate how vulnerable they are to those who are out in the real world. They are not immune to the world around them.”

That realization can’t come soon enough for Fearrington: “It has to stop. We are still all humans at the end of the day,” she said.

Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Profiteers

How the race to develop treatments and a vaccine will create a historic windfall for the industry — and everyone else will pay the price.

August 16, 2020 Matt Taibbi ROLLING STONE

https://portside.org/2020-08-16/big-pharmas-covid-19-profiteers

On June 29th, 2020, while America remained transfixed by anti-police protests, the chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Gilead issued a much-anticipated announcement. In a breezy open letter, Daniel O’Day explained how much his company planned on charging for a course of remdesivir, one of many possible treatments for Covid-19. “In the weeks since we learned of remdesivir’s potential against Covid-19, one topic has attracted more speculation than any other: what price we might set for the medicine,” O’Day wrote, before plunging into a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak.

The CEO noted a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, showing that Covid-19 patients taking remdesivir recovered after 11 days, compared with 15 days for placebo takers. In the U.S., he wrote, “earlier hospital discharge would result in hospital savings of approximately $12,000 per patient.”

The hilarious implication seemed to be that by shortening hospital stays by four days on average, remdesivir was worth $48,000 a dose. That O’Day might come to such a conclusion was not outlandish. Gilead became infamous a few years ago for charging $84,000 per course of treatment for Sovaldi, a “groundbreaking” hepatitis-C drug. The company’s policies for pricing have more than once prompted congressional hearings, as in the case of Truvada, a drug to combat HIV transmission that was developed in part with the aid of government grants and that earned Gilead more than $30 billion in revenue. Would they try something similar at a time of unprecedented medical terror with one of the few available Covid-19 treatments?

No, as it turned out. Although “we can see the value that remdesivir provides” — i.e., we could have charged $48,000 per dose — Day wrote, “we have decided to price remdesivir well below this value.” He went on to say that to “ensure broad and equitable access at a time of urgent global need,” Gilead had generously decided to place the price for remdesivir at a measly $3,120 per patient.

Investors were bummed. Gilead even undercut the prediction of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), a watchdog that calculated a fair price for remdesivir at $4,500 per course of treatment. When Gilead announced a price below that level, it caused a tremor on Wall Street, as its share price fell. The company had already offended the Gods of Capitalism by donating hundreds of thousands of existing doses of remdesivir to the government. What self-respecting American corporation voluntarily undermines its own market?

Not Gilead, as it turns out, and really, not any pharmaceutical company. What Americans need to understand about the race to find vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 is that in the U.S., even when companies appear to downshift from maximum greed levels — and it’s not at all clear they’ve done this with coronavirus treatments — the production of pharmaceutical drugs is still a nearly riskless, subsidy-laden scam.

Americans reacted in horror five years ago when a self-satisfied shark of an executive named Martin Shkreli, a.k.a. the “Pharma Bro,” helped his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raise the price of lifesaving toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill. Shkreli, who smirked throughout congressional testimony and tweeted that lawmakers were “imbeciles,” was held up as a uniquely smug exemplar of corporate evil. On some level, though, he was right to roll his eyes at all the public outrage. Although he was convicted on unrelated corruption charges, little about his specific attitudes toward drug pricing was unusual. Really, the whole industry is one big Shkreli, and Covid-19 — a highly contagious virus with unique properties that may require generations of vaccinations and booster shots — looms now as the ultimate cash cow for lesser-known Pharma Bros.

“The power of the industry combined with fear is driving extraordinary spending,” says U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who has been an outspoken and sometimes lonely voice warning about pandemic profiteering. “It all suggests rosy times ahead for the pharmaceutical industry.”

Doggett cautions that the rush for a cure is already padding the bottom lines of drug companies. Take the example of remdesivir, which he describes as having been “pulled off the scrap heap” to become a major revenue-driver. Having failed to be approved as a treatment for hepatitis and Ebola, it is now one of the most in-demand products in the world, and its price isn’t quite so low as Gilead claims.

For one thing, ICER reported it costs just $10 of raw materials to make each dose of remdesivir. Generic-drug producers in Bangladesh and India were already making a version of it, and their price per course of treatment was $600. Meanwhile, Gilead’s own price for governments around the world — the price it settled on for everyone except American private insurers — was $2,340 per treatment.

Moreover, ICER’s assessment of remdesivir’s price relied significantly on the idea that it would actually help save the lives of Covid-19 sufferers. “If the drug doesn’t impact mortality, and only shortens recovery time,” says Dave Whitrap of ICER, “we figure a course of treatment is worth about $310.”

To recap: Gilead, a company with a market capitalization of more than $90 billion, making it bigger than Goldman Sachs, develops an antiviral drug with the help of $99 million in American government grant money. Though the drug may cost as little as $10 per dose to make, and is being produced generically in Bangladesh at about a fifth of the list price, and costs about a third less in Europe than it does in the U.S., Gilead ended up selling hundreds of thousands of doses at the maximum conceivable level, i.e., the American private-insurance price — which, incidentally, might be about 10 times what it’s worth, given its actual medical impact.

But almost no one cared. A day after the remdesivir price was announced, Donald Trump bought 500,000 doses through September, basically the entire world supply of the drug. There were a few stories in the American press quoting Europeans who seemed startled by the selfishness of the act. “Imagine if this was a vaccine?” Liverpool University’s Dr. Andrew Hill wondered. Mostly, however, the reaction to the U.S. hoarding one of just two drugs shown to have positive effects in treating a civilization-imperiling disease (the other is the steroid dexamethasone) was muted.

Why? As articulated by Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, no sick person will ever see anything like a bill for the real cost of the drug. “The hospitals have to eat the cost of treatment use,” McEnany said. “The patient will not see the cost.”

This sounds great on the surface, but of course, Americans, through their tax dollars, will pay for treatments like remdesivir and for potential vaccines. Recent House and Senate emergency-spending bills allocate as much as $20 billion or more for vaccine development, and another $6 billion for manufacturing and distribution. “The public will pay for much research and manufacturing,” says Doggett. “Only the profits will be privatized.”

Still, because individuals won’t be handed physical bills for pills or shots, nobody balks at prices companies set, if they even know what they are. With remdesivir, “nobody in the Trump administration complained” about price, says Gerald Posner, author of Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. “Just as nobody in a Biden administration likely would have complained. Does anybody care?”


It’s surprising, or maybe it isn’t, that all of this is going on during a period of intense political protest. For as much as America is going through changes, many of the dumbest aspects of our political system have remained impervious to reform. There was political will to change the formula for Big Pharma in the early Nineties and in the Obama years, and revolution is in the air now. Just likely not enough to bring drug prices down to a reasonable level.

Profiteering over the coronavirus pandemic is still in the larval stage. The average news reader has heard some enraging stories — a man busted for a $45 million scheme to defraud New York City through phony PPE sales, another arrested for hoarding 192,000 N95 respirator masks and 598,000 medical gloves, a third caught trying to bilk the VA out of $750 million — but the giant-scale gouging will take place later. And it will all be legal.

Soon enough, the infected and uninfected alike will pay any price to try to stave off illness through vaccines and cocktails of expensive treatments. It is an unprecedented profiteering opportunity, because most everyone on Earth is destined to become a customer of some kind — in fact, the United States is already a massive buyer of Covid-19 treatments despite no evidence of efficacy. “We’re in the extraordinary position of spending billions on vaccines before we know if they work,” says Doggett.

Some of the rush to spend money on treatments is driven by a perhaps-unrealistic expectation that vaccines will be available soon, or at all. Dr. Robert Gallo, co-founder and international scientific adviser of the Global Virus Network and one of the world’s leading virologists — he is the co-discoverer of HIV and the developer of the HIV blood test, among other things — worries that the unique characteristics of Covid-19 will make it hard for any traditional vaccine to have “durability.”

“You look at the structure of the proteins, and it’s a lot like HIV, because of its glycan shields,” he says, referring to sugars that protect viruses from antibodies. “Antibodies that are glycosylated in this way do not last.” Because of this, Gallo says, he worries that companies might be tempted to declare victory prematurely. He warns that people who put timetables on when treatments might be available — Trump often says things like, “We’re very close,” and press observers like Politico have warned that the administration is sitting on an “October vaccine surprise” — are almost always being disingenuous. “I’ve always said, you don’t have a vaccine until you have one, until you’re sure it works.”

Still, there’s widespread expectation that vaccines are coming — we’ve heard reports about vaccines like AstraZeneca’s AZD1222 supposedly producing good results in trials — and an observer looking on the surface level might conclude that Big Pharma in this crisis is breaking long-standing patterns of exploitation. After all, several of the biggest drugmakers have made public pledges to produce vaccines at cost, including Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. “We’ll do it at no profit,” AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said. “This is what a successful, healthy pharmaceutical industry can do.”

The problem with these pledges is nobody knows what they mean. In the case of Johnson & Johnson, the company promised to produce vaccines at cost “for the duration of the emergency.” When Doggett and his staff asked what this means, they got no answer. Nor is there any transparency about what terms like “cost” mean, or how the billions allocated for research are being spent.

Add the unique arc of the Covid-19 story — which may require decades of intense, ongoing investment — and gestures like the ones made by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca begin to give off an ominous odor. “You can put about as much faith in their promises as you can in the pitch of any salesperson,” says Doggett.

The Covid-19 disaster will rely significantly upon these corporate drugmakers to not only come up with cures and treatments, but to also create a manageable price for people around the world, since the pandemic won’t be stopped unless the whole world gets treated. “Is Big Pharma going to do the right thing?” asks Dana Gill, U.S. policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders. Citing the historic example of the drugmakers’ reluctance to provide HIV drugs to poor nations, and even the high price of hepatitis treatments like Sovaldi, she adds, “There’s plenty of examples of pharma companies not doing the right thing.”

What guarantees there will be a problem? The central role of the United States, whose dystopia of a medical bureaucracy is God’s gift to pharmaceutical companies.

Every other country in the world has a three-stage process for approving and pricing prescription drugs. Governments first ask if the drug is safe. If the answer is yes, it asks if the drug is effective.

If the drug passes those two hurdles, most governments then ask how much more effective the new drug is compared to existing medicines. This efficacy calculation becomes the starting point for price negotiations, which usually involve threatening to keep the drug out of the country’s state-insured pool of medications if the company does not come up with a reasonable price.

The U.S. either skips or botches these steps. First, there is no regulatory review that determines comparative efficacy. In the U.S., the FDA review ends after the first two steps: Once a drug is deemed safe and effective, it goes on the market.

Then comes the whopper: All FDA-approved drugs must, by law, be covered by Medicaid. This rule dates to 1990 with the creation of the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program. The “grand bargain” that was supposed to be built into this reform concept was that all FDA drugs would be purchased by Medicaid, provided that manufacturers gave the government either the best price available to insurers, or a 23.1 percent discount over the drug’s list price.

This sounds great, except drug manufacturers simply began figuring the Medicaid “discount” into their list-price calculations. If the medical condition is serious enough and the drug has no effective analog, companies can dictate their price. As a result, we end up with situations like the 2014 Sovaldi episode, in which Medicaid spent $3 billion in a single year just on the one drug, and was still forced to severely ration the medicine, giving it to just 2.4 percent of hepatitis-C patients. Gill notes that only 37 percent of Americans are treated for hepatitis C even now, in part because of the high price of the drug.

The business model for Big Pharma is brilliant. A substantial portion of research and development for new drugs is funded by the state, which then punts its intellectual work to private companies, who are then allowed to extract maximum profits back from the same government, which has over decades formalized an elaborate process of negotiating against itself in these matters.

How big are these giveaways? Since the 1930s, the NIH has spent about $930 billion in research. Between 2010 and 2016, every single drug that won approval from the FDA — 210 different pharmaceuticals — grew at least in part out of research funded by the NIH. A common pattern involves R&D conducted by a small or midsize company, which sells out to a behemoth like Gilead the instant its drug makes it through trials, and obscene prices are set.

This was the case with Sovaldi, for instance, which Gilead acquired when it spent $11 billion in 2012 buying out original developer Pharmasset, which had worked on a line of hepatitis drugs. Within five years, Gilead earned more than $58 billion on a line of hepatitis treatments it won in the Pharmasset deal.

This same pattern seems likely to hold with Covid-19 treatments, only the cycle of exploitation will be accelerated. “It’s a microcosm of a larger broken system, in which you have an R&D system that’s profit-driven rather than people-driven,” says Gill. “These problems existed before Covid-19, and now the U.S. is pumping billions of taxpayer funds into these companies, in most cases with no strings attached.”

Those billions are going to a handful of pharmaceutical companies participating in the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, the stated aim of which is to deliver 300 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine by January 2021. On March 30th, the Department of Health and Human Services announced $456 million in spending for a Johnson & Johnson vaccine program. On April 16th, it announced $483 million for Moderna, a company that (this is not a joke) has never once successfully brought a drug to market. AstraZeneca got $1.2 billion for its vaccine program on May 21st. On June 1st, Emergent BioSolutions won $628 million to provide manufacturing for vaccines. On July 7th, Novavax cashed in, with $1.6 billion for vaccine development. Toward the end of July, the Trump administration announced a deal with Pfizer and the German firm BioNTech to spend $2 billion on 100 million doses of a vaccine. One of these companies is likely to develop the drug that allows the world to go back to normal, and the heroism of those researchers is going to be overshadowed by a profiteering system that rewards their bosses instead of them.

Indeed, the Pfizer deal surprised some, because it seemed to be priced at just $19.50 per dose. But experts estimate that when all is said and done, the same drug will sell overseas for about half that cost. As one Democratic Hill staffer puts it, “They’re making sure that the U.S. pays the highest possible price.”

The Trump administration has tools at its disposal that it could use to lower prices. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gives any agency that funds research leading to a patent to use “march-in rights” to give out licenses to other manufacturers, if, among other things, the patent holder has not done enough to meet the “health or safety needs” of consumers. The president could also employ a federal law called Section 1498, which essentially allows the government to ignore patent rights in an effort to lower prices. Such rights have been invoked before, such as when Bayer cut prices of the anti-anthrax drug ciprofloxacin after the Bush II administration threatened to use that authority (ironically, current Trump HHS Secretary Alex Azar worked under Bush during that time).

“Taxpayers are the angel investors in pharmaceuticals,” says Doggett. “Any other investor would demand a stake in the outcome.”

To date, Trump has shown no interest in invoking either power. He recently signed four related executive orders that ostensibly would lower prices of generics through several means, including allowing importation from Canada and forcing Medicaid to buy drugs at the same prices that other countries pay. One Democratic aide called it “interesting” — but it was amusing to hear Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla complain that Trump was ushering in “socialized medicine.”

The casual follower of this story is probably best served understanding the Covid-19 crisis less as a historic boondoggle (that’s more likely to be found in the financial bailouts) and more as an all-out war by industry lobbyists to retain a system that is already sociopathic and grotesquely anti-competitive in the face of intense public pressure during the pandemic. To be sure, companies like AstraZeneca and Pfizer will end up making a giant pile of money from vaccines and therapies. This is particularly the case because of the somewhat eccentric nature of the disease.


“We might need several vaccines,” says Whitrap, echoing a sentiment suggested by numerous scientists, that the best course ultimately might be a cocktail of different antibody-producing techniques that will have to be administered in an overlapping strategy, perhaps with regular booster shots.

Add the fact that treatment of the already-infected will involve combination therapies (like remdesivir with dexamethasone, to begin with), and the endgame for pharmaceutical companies might be years if not decades of doses that will have to be stockpiled in enormous quantities everywhere on Earth.

This will be worth many billions to firms like Gilead, but the more important win for these companies is staving off efforts to end the monster-subsidy system built into the grant-to-patent process that is suddenly in plain view because of this disaster.

The early days of the pandemic provided ominous clues on these fronts. In March, Gilead had the stones to apply for an “orphan” designation for remdesivir, which would have given it a seven-year exclusivity window, tax breaks, waived FDA fees, and other commercial advantages.

The orphan designation was created in 1983 to provide an incentive for drug companies to develop treatments for rare disorders that affect comparatively small numbers of people, like Wilson’s disease or familial hypercholesterolemia — horrific diseases that are a major challenge to treat, but don’t offer drug companies a potential significant windfall if they develop a cure. Under the law, companies can earn orphan designation for a drug if it’s intended for treatment of fewer than 200,000 Americans.

Gilead applied for orphan perks before there were 200,000 sufferers of Covid-19 in the United States, but everyone knew this was no rare disease. Such a brazen effort to try to get the government to hand over tax credits and help squeeze out generic competitors through the use of a law designed to bribe pharmaceutical firms into developing cures for financially unpromising diseases was crude, but effective. The FDA granted the request! (Gilead did not respond to requests for comments on this story.)

Public Citizen called the move “outrageous,” and so did Bernie Sanders (well, Bernie said “truly outrageous”), and there was enough of a backlash that Gilead rescinded its own request on March 25th.

The Gilead orphan example, however, was indicative not only of the pharmaceutical companies’ thinking, but also of the political climate. Big Pharma has been extraordinarily adept at lobbying and keeping effective control of Congress. In 2003, Congress passed the Medicare Prescription Drug act, a bill pitched as a way to reduce drug prices that became a titanic industry handout.

The Bush-era law included a notorious anti-competitive provision barring the government from using its purchasing power to negotiate with companies. Much of the bill was written by Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin, who retired from the House shortly after it was passed and took a $2 million-per-year Thank You for Smoking-style plum job from the trade group PhRMA as the drugmakers’ Spokesperson for Evil.

A few years later, when a popular young politician named Barack Obama ran for president and won the White House promising to lower drug prices through reimportation and bulk negotiation, Tauzin and his crew met repeatedly with the new leader. At the conclusion of those meetings, the Obama administration took those proposed reforms off the table.

“The pharmaceutical companies are clearly nondiscriminatory in the political sense,” says Doggett. “Their political power is incredible.”

In March, we saw a dramatic demonstration, when the first $8.3 billion emergency-spending bill made its way through Congress. The bill included a provision inserted by Democrats that would have limited the intellectual-property rights of companies developing vaccines the government thinks are priced unfairly. Industry lobbyists not only managed to kill that provision, they also got another one inserted that protected the industry from having the approval of drugs delayed if the product is overpriced. “They couldn’t even hold off those two clauses,” Posner says.

For Posner, who has written extensively about Big Pharma, the spectacle of Democrats pounding the table for an end to price gouging is more like Kabuki theater. A few scattered members, like Doggett, will make elaborate demands, but in bills that have no hope of passing. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies always seem to get what they want. Posner points to the swine flu vaccine in the Gerald Ford years, when companies like Sharp and Dohme (Merck) refused to help develop vaccines unless they were guaranteed profits and shielded from liability.

Ultimately, the swine flu vaccine was a fiasco, resulting in a number of horrible side effects, including as many as 450 cases of the degenerative nerve disease Guillain-Barré. The taxpayer ended up paying for the swine flu vaccine coming and going, through guaranteed profits at the front and outlays for piles of lawsuits from victims on the other side. Nothing like that has happened with Covid-19, but the same pattern of major concessions won upfront, mixed with what amounts to guarantees of profit, is present.

“It’s a rip-off,” says Posner, comparing the olive-branch “no profit” promises by vaccine-makers to the free samples handed out by heroin dealers. In the lifesaving drug business, once you’re in the door, the rest is just counting money. And with Covid-19, the counting has already begun.







Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. His most recent book is ‘I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street,’ about the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police. He’s also the author of the New York Times bestsellers 'Insane Clown President,' 'The Divide,' 'Griftopia,' and 'The Great Derangement.'

A Brief History Of Political Interference In The U.S. Postal Service

Political interference in the U.S. Postal Service isn't new, according to Winifred Gallagher, the author of How the Post Office Created America.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro (host), Winifred Gallagher (guest)

https://portside.org/2020-08-16/brief-history-political-interference-us-postal-service

The U.S. Postal Service is hemorrhaging money, and the Trump administration has suggested it won't bail it out. Speaking yesterday, President Trump blamed Democrats for the Postal Service's financial problems, saying they aren't approving funding for mail-in voting. The Biden campaign is calling the administration's moves sabotage, saying it is an attempt to gut an institution that is an essential part of American life and to thwart the demand for mail-in ballots before an election. But political interference in the U.S. Postal Service isn't new, says our next guest. Winifred Gallagher is the author of "How The Post Office Created America," and she joins us now.

Welcome.

WINIFRED GALLAGHER: Good morning.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So before we get to what is happening now, I want to start with history. The roots of the post office actually go back to when the U.S. was 13 colonies.

GALLAGHER: Yeah, even before the Declaration of Independence. The post office has really been woven into America's DNA since Benjamin Franklin. He was our first postmaster general and our founding father. In the 1760s and '70s, the American patriots created these underground postal networks that enabled them to conspire, talk treason under the British radar.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've called the Postal Service our democracy's unifier and equalizer. How did it become America's favorite government service?

GALLAGHER: I would date it to 1792. That's when our post office became truly unique. George Washington, Benjamin Rush and James Madison decided to use the postal network to create an informed electorate. This was, like, very radical. The Europeans were horrified. These founders devised this kind of Robin Hood scheme that used the high cost of postage to send letters to subsidize the cost of mailing cheap, uncensored newspapers to every citizen so that they could understand public affairs before they cast their votes.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But after that, politicians used the post office for their own ends. How so?

GALLAGHER: Actually, they didn't interfere with postal operations very much until Andrew Jackson became president. He created what is called the spoils system. So he made the postmaster general a very powerful Cabinet officers and installed his political cronies in that position. And for nearly a century and a half, this spoils system allowed whichever party won the White House to reward its supporters with tens of thousands of jobs.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So there is a lot of concern over the financial trouble the post office is in. But this, you know, predates this administration. Briefly walk us through how we got to this moment.

GALLAGHER: Yeah. I would date it to the - the current crisis to the 1980s, when a very timid USPS management and Congress fatefully decided not to shift from letter mail to email. They could've given Americans digital addresses the same way they gave us our physical street addresses. And in fact, of course, as everyone knows, by 2001, email had drastically reduced the volume of first-class letter mail.

And then that crisis was worsened further by the really disastrous Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which restricted the Postal Service's ability to offer new services or adjust its pricing to its cost, and worse, required it to prefund its retiree health care benefits decades into the future, which created billions of dollars of debt. And that is what has prevented the post office from turning a profit for the past six years.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let's talk about what the Trump administration has now done. Louis DeJoy has been appointed as the postmaster general. He is a North Carolina businessman and a major Trump donor who reportedly has financial interests and competitors to the post office. And he stepped in, and he's cut the overtime of hundreds of thousands of employees. He said he would hold mail if it can't be sorted. This is purportedly to cut costs. Do you see it that way?

GALLAGHER: No, not at all. And it also, of course, reminds me of his favorite president - is Andrew Jackson. And that's the guy who invented the spoils system and made the postmaster general his political crony. Congress has to accept its responsibility and restore the USPS to health with these very commonsense reforms, including forgiving the huge debt for the retiree health care benefits, and also allow it to raise its prices very modestly. These are just things that the Congress has to do to, you know, preserve the system at this time of incredible partisanship and fragmentation. We have this one big, unifying national delivery system, and we need it to continue to support our democracy and free speech in ways that, you know, Benjamin Franklin couldn't even have imagined - delivering medicines and test kits during a COVID epidemic, but especially voting by mail.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Winifred Gallagher is the author of "How The Post Office Created America: A History."

Thank you very much.

GALLAGHER: Thank you.

'Canary in the Coal Mine': Greenland Ice Has Shrunk Beyond Return, Study Finds

Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.

August 16, 2020 Cassandra Garrison REUTERS

https://portside.org/2020-08-16/canary-coal-mine-greenland-ice-has-shrunk-beyond-return-study-finds




Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.

Scientists studied data on 234 glaciers across the Arctic territory spanning 34 years through 2018 and found that annual snowfall was no longer enough to replenish glaciers of the snow and ice being lost to summertime melting.

That melting is already causing global seas to rise about a millimeter on average per year. If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades.

“Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point,” said glaciologist Ian Howat at Ohio State University. He and his colleagues published the study Thursday in the Nature Communications Earth & Environment journal.

The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years.

The Arctic thaw has brought more water to the region, opening up routes for shipping traffic, as well as increased interest in extracting fossil fuels and other natural resources.

Greenland is strategically important for the U.S. military and its ballistic missile early warning system, as the shortest route from Europe to North America goes via the Arctic island.

Last year, President Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. But Denmark, a U.S. ally, rebuffed the offer. Then last month, the U.S. reopened a consulate in the territory’s capital of Nuuk, and Denmark reportedly said last week it was appointing an intermediary between Nuuk and Copenhagen some 3,500 kilometers away.

Scientists, however, have long worried about Greenland’s fate, given the amount of water locked into the ice.

The new study suggests the territory’s ice sheet will now gain mass only once every 100 years — a grim indicator of how difficult it is to re-grow glaciers once they hemorrhage ice.

In studying satellite images of the glaciers, the researchers noted that the glaciers had a 50% chance of regaining mass before 2000, with the odds declining since.

“We are still draining more ice now than what was gained through snow accumulation in ‘good’ years,” said lead author Michalea King, a glaciologist at Ohio State University.

The sobering findings should spur governments to prepare for sea-level rise, King said.

“Things that happen in the polar regions don’t stay in the polar region,” she said.

Still, the world can still bring down emissions to slow climate change, scientists said. Even if Greenland can’t regain the icy bulk that covered its 2 million square kilometers, containing the global temperature rise can slow the rate of ice loss.

“When we think about climate action, we’re not talking about building back the Greenland ice sheet,” said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who was not involved in the study. “We’re talking about how quickly rapid sea-level rise comes to our communities, our infrastructure, our homes, our military bases.”

Dems Begin Signaling A Post-Election Surrender On Health Care

Biden and every Dem Senate challenger is running on a public option, but party Hill aides quickly start promising a retreat after the health care industry begins attacks.


Andrew Perez
Aug 17




This story was written by Andrew Perez and David Sirota.



On the eve of a Democratic National Convention taking place as millions lose health care coverage, the health care industry is launching a new ad campaign pressing Democrats to back off the party’s already compromised health care promises. That pressure seems to be having its intended effect on Capitol Hill as congressional aides say the party will not push the initiative if Biden wins. The signs of retreat come as health care industry profits are skyrocketing and the industry’s campaign cash has flooded into Democratic coffers.

The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) -- a front group created by health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital lobbying groups to oppose “Medicare for All” -- announced on Friday that it is launching a new national ad campaign to persuade Democrats to abandon their plans to create a public health insurance plan. The group said it will run ads during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week. PAHCF is led by a former Hillary Clinton aide and run out of the offices of a D.C. lobbying firm led by former top Democratic congressional aides.

A substantial “public option” plan — which polls show is wildly popular — was the centerpiece of recent policy negotiations between supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden and progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had been pushing for a more expansive Medicare for All program. A draft of the party platform, approved by DNC members late last month, includes a pledge to pass a public option, or a government-run health insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.

Within 24 hours of the launch of the industry’s new ads, however, anonymous Democratic congressional sources were telling The Hill that Democrats likely won’t bother with the public option fight next year if Biden wins the election. Instead, they said the party will instead work to tweak the party’s 2010 health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has done little to limit insurance or hospital costs and has failed to ensure universal coverage.

To justify the preemptive retreat, Democratic congressional aides told the newspaper that the party’s moderate crop of 2020 Senate challenger candidates could make it harder to pass a public option. That assertion comes even though every single one of those candidates is currently campaigning in support of a public option, according to a TMI review of campaign statements.

The situation echoes the Democratic promises and subsequent surrender on a public option that marked the debate over health care more than a decade ago -- only this time around, the health care crisis is an even more acute emergency. While most developed countries have managed to contain COVID-19, the pandemic is spiraling out of control in the U.S. and an estimated 27 million people have lost their employer-based health insurance plans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

At the same time, the coronavirus crisis has been a boon for much of the corporate health care industry -- particularly for insurance companies and drugmakers, but also for some investor-owned hospital companies. As PAHCF gears up to fight the public option, the interests the group represents have been generating outsized profits and benefiting from massive federal assistance.
Democrats Promise Big Reforms

The idea of a public option isn’t new -- progressives fought unsuccessfully for its inclusion in the ACA, but the Democratic-controlled Senate refused to pass it. Ten years later, the public option has become a middle-ground proposal favored by many moderate Democrats.

One of the more common arguments for supporting a public option over Medicare for All is that it would be easier to pass such a public option through Congress than a single-payer program that eliminates the need for private health insurance coverage.

The public option generally polls better than Medicare for All -- people like being told they can buy into a plan or choose to keep their existing plan -- though public polling has found strong support for both ideas, especially as Americans grapple with the coronavirus crisis.

Of course, whether you keep your employer-based health insurance plan is less up to you than your boss or the overall state of the economy, as millions of Americans have experienced during a pandemic that’s caused global business shutdowns. Medicare for All would also likely cost the country far less in the long term.

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Biden repeatedly slammed Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal while offering scant details about what a government health insurance plan would look like in his administration. Last month, the joint policy task force between the Biden and Sanders camps released a detailed framework for a public option plan that would actually represent a significant piece of reform, if enacted.



“The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles, will be administered by the traditional Medicare program, not private companies, and will cover all primary care without any copayments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people,” the task force wrote.

The Biden-Sanders task force plan includes some key details about what a public option would look like that weren’t clear during the Democratic primary campaign. Biden’s website never said (it still doesn’t say) whether his public option plan would have a deductible. It also wasn’t clear who would administer the plan -- the task force document says Medicare. Anyone could sign up.

A draft of the DNC platform includes similar language about a public option. It says that Democrats will “make available on the marketplace a public option administered through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which includes a platinum-level choice, with low fees and no deductibles.” The DNC language would also make the public option available to all Americans, and “will cover all primary care without any co-payments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals.”
‘More Modest Package Of Fixes’

Despite optimism from progressives about Biden’s health care plan, the negotiations between the Biden and Sanders teams might not ultimately matter.

According to a new report in The Hill, Democratic congressional aides anticipate “the party would start next year with a more modest package of fixes to Obamacare that did not include a public option in an effort to get some early points on the board.”

The story reads like a trial balloon offering prefabricated talking points for the early weeks of a Biden administration when Democrats make huge concessions to industry in exchange for peanuts, while progressives watch in horror.

The Hill further reported: “A Senate Democratic aide...noted that if Democrats win back the Senate, it will be through red or purple states, and there will be plenty more moderate members in the caucus.”

Every single Democratic challenger running in a competitive Senate race this cycle has publicly campaigned on a public option -- Mark Kelly in Arizona, Sara Gideon in Maine, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, John Hickenlooper in Colorado, Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Steve Bullock in Montana, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Barbara Bollier in Kansas. Even Amy McGrath, the Trump Democrat running in Kentucky, supports a public option.

There are some better potential explanations for why Democrats might give up on the public option already.

For one, Democratic lawmakers have received $86 million from donors in the health care industry since 2019, according to OpenSecrets. That’s an average of $310,000 per politician. The party's Senate-focused super PAC and an affiliated dark money group has also received large donations from health care interests.

Perhaps the biggest factor at play is that the corporate health care industry can and likely will spend tens of millions of dollars to try to make the public option unpopular and demonize the Democratic Party by extension.

After all, in 2009 and 2010, the health insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) secretly funneled $100 million into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to finance a marketing and astroturf campaign against the Affordable Care Act. Democrats ultimately nixed the public option before passing the bill, and ended up losing control of the House of Representatives in a landslide election anyway.
Thriving Health Care Industry Ready To Pounce

PAHCF -- a dark money group led by AHIP and lobbying groups for pharmaceutical companies and hospitals -- already spent $4.5 million on slamming Medicare for All in presidential primary states and at least as much to block a state-level public option in Colorado this year.

And that was before COVID, which has been an absolute windfall for much of the corporate health care industry.

Health insurance companies doubled their profits between April and June compared to last year, specifically because Americans are avoiding medical care and putting off surgeries.



The Trump administration has been throwing gobs of cash at pharmaceutical and biotech companies -- at least $8 billion so far -- to produce stockpiles of potential COVID vaccines “before clinical trials have been completed,” according to the New York Times.

Hospitals have been hit hard by the pandemic, as emergency rooms have seen surges of patients with deadly respiratory issues. Doctors and workers have risked their lives to save others, often without adequate protective gear. Hundreds of health care workers have died. Many hospitals are struggling financially because people are avoiding medical care.

Some hospitals are doing better than others. In June, Reuters reported that two major investor-owned hospital chains, HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare, had received billions of dollars in federal loans and grants since the start of the pandemic and “appear to be benefiting disproportionately from the initial government relief as some other hospitals struggle to stay afloat.” HCA and Tenet are both PAHCF members.

On Friday, PAHCF previewed its new advertising campaign against the public option.

One ad warns that “your taxes would pay for a public option.” This should evidently scare people who are already paying expensive monthly premiums to insurance companies that often find ways to avoid paying for their care.

Another ad says the public option could become "the third largest government program" behind Social Security and Medicare.
Echoes Of The Public Option Retreat A Decade Ago

If the promises and subsequent retreat seem familiar, that’s because the situation echoes what happened a decade ago.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s platform included a promise to create a public health care option -- a promise he later pretended he never made.



Obama and Biden came into office with sky-high approval ratings and a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority -- a perfect setting for the new Democratic administration to quickly pass a public option. However, soon after being elected, Obama and Biden’s White House began backing away from the public-option pledge -- well before the party lost its 60 Senate votes.

“One of the earliest signs that the public option was a negotiable item for the administration came in July 2009, from Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff,” reported Health Affairs. “Emanuel floated the idea of a ‘trigger’ that would enable the public option only if the desired competition and cost control failed to materialize. During the congressional recess in August 2009, at the height of the town hall pushback against health reform, other administration voices began to downplay the importance of the public option.”

By the end of 2009, Senate Democrats dropped their support for a public option in response to opposition from Sen. Joe Lieberman. A few months later as the ACA was being finalized, Democratic senators refused to even use their power to force a recorded public vote on legislation to create a public option.

Fast forward ten years and some Democratic congressional aides appear to be telegraphing the retreat process again -- setting the stage for backing off a public option before the election has even occurred.

Trump Gets Stunned By The Most Obvious Question

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KGQj4agbmw