Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

Last week you appointed the head lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase as your new chief of staff and in yesterday’s paper there was a small article on the inside pages that the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to deny public hospitals and clinics who treat the poor the right to sue drug companies for overcharging them. Now I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but is there some bizarre link here? A quid pro quo that Daley wanted this in order to become your new chief of staff? He is, after all, on the board of Abbott Labs, the big pharmaceutical company, and he is a lobbyist (although not “registered” as one) so maybe he wanted to keep his lucrative ties to Abbott and.... well, you get the picture. I mean, this defense of the drug industry is astounding. Like the Republicans passing the initial drug coverage for Medicare but prohibiting Medicare from negotiating prices for drugs. Boy, did the American public ever get hoodwinked on that one; the old shell game of make them think they’re getting a great benefit when in reality the whole thing was a scheme to enrich their already rich friends in the drug industry. Anyhow, back to the point. Did you know Holder and his people at Justice were going to do this? It was a pretty small article buried on page 9 so you may not have noticed and Holder might not have mentioned they were going to file this friend of the court brief. But the article noted that the drug companies had been overcharging public hospitals and clinics for years and nobody did anything about it and finally, when some of them filed a suit to make big pharma adhere to the terms of the program, the Justice Department decides that only they can file such a suit and asks the court to rule against the hospitals and clinics because they fear an onslaught of suits. Well, duh!! The drug companies have been ripping off the government, the hospitals, the clinics, the poor and the rest of us for years and now when they get sued they say it’s all very complicated and they’ve done nothing wrong and get their friends in the administration - your administration, the Hope, Change and Transformation administration - to defend them. No difference between Republicans and Democrats. You guys are all in the same party - the Republicrats.