On Fox, Morris tells viewers to "[g]o to DickMorris.com and ... see 30 other targets" to swing on health reform vote
March 19, 2010 10:03 pm ET
From the March 19 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:
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Yeah, I told he didn't know his butt from a hole in the wall....
Yeah, I told he didn't know his butt from a hole in the wall....
Morris is certainly unqualified to speak on any subject in the political spectrum....now, if he wants to sell OxyClean, fine...
If Beck is being paid to oppose health care reform shouldn't FOX disclose that?
"That's a lobbyist for the hospital industry and he's talking about the hospital industry's specific deal with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee and, yeah, I think the hospital industry's got a deal here. There really were only two deals, meaning quid pro quo handshake deals on both sides, one with the hospitals and the other with the drug industry. And I think what you're interested in is that in the background of these deals was the presumption, shared on behalf of the lobbyists on the one side and the White House on the other, that the public option was not going to be in the final product."
Kirkpatrick also acknowledged that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina had confirmed the existence of the deal.
Published: March 19 2010 02:00 | Last updated: March 19 2010 02:00
A proposal backed by President Barack Obama that would have banned multibillion-dollar deals between big pharmaceutical companies and their generic rivals was stripped out of healthcare legislation at the eleventh hour, according to lobbyists for the generic drug industry.
The agreements have come under scrutiny from antitrust officials in the US and Europe because they say the arrangements essentially allow branded drugmakers to pay off potential generic competitors, thereby keeping them out of the market. The Federal Trade Commission has estimated that such deals cost consumers $3.5bn (€2.5bn, £2.3bn) every year.
Last month the Obama administration called for such "pay for delay" deals to be outlawed. It was one of only a handful of suggestions the White House pushed for lawmakers to adopt as they prepared to fine-tune the legislation.
Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said the exclusion of the provision reflected the complexity of passing the bill through the reconciliation process, and not because there was not enough political support for the move.
Democratic leaders are seeking to pass healthcare reform through the reconciliation process because the parliamentary manoeuvre only requires the support of a simple majority in the Senate. But the tactic is supposed to be used for proposals related to the budget.
Attorneys for big drugmakers had expressed alarm over the proposed legislation because they said it raised questions about the legality of any negotiated settlement between branded and generic drugmakers.
Mr Leibowitz, who has argued vociferously against such deals, says the drugmakers would not be celebrating for long. "We've always moved forward several steps and then back a step only to move forward again," he says. "I'm much more sanguine about the prospect of this passing [as a standalone bill] than I was six months ago."
Even as the generic drug lobbyists celebrated the defeat of the ban on some patent settlements, it criticised other aspects of the legislation. Mr Obama had encouraged lawmakers to revise a proposed 12-year exclusivity period for biotech drugs, which would keep bio-similar drugs - the generic version of biotech drugs - off the market. That provision remained in place at the insistence of branded drugmakers, however.
Democrats received another boost yesterday when the AFL-CIO, the US's largest labour union, urged the House to pass the bill. The bill's text was put online for 72 hours to give Americans a chance to read it before the vote.
There's even a right-wing statement saying essentially "If insurance reform does pass, we're going to attack them for government-run fascism, if it DOESN'T pass, we're going to attack them for their failure to pass it."