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The Obama Watch
Hard on Drug Execs, Soft on Dictators
That’s the way this administration likes to conduct its business.
I was in Israel for two weeks hearing nothing but how the Obama administration is tougher (in action and language) on Israel than it has been on the Muslim Brotherhood (the White House seder included a Tahrir Square salad) and Syria’s dictator Bashir al-Assad.
Now it turns out that Team O is tougher on drug company CEOs than it is on brutal dictators and a movement whose goal is wiping out Israel. The administration is applying a little used government approach to knee-capping executives it doesn’t like by threatening that HHS won’t allow Forest Laboratories to sell medications to Medicare, Medicaid, and other government health programs (which means every health plan under Obamacare) unless it tosses the company’s CEO, Howard Solomon. According to news accounts, the action is being taken because government lawyers claim that just fining the company billions isn’t stopping illegal behavior. But neither Mr. Solomon nor Forest has been found guilty of any wrongdoing. Here’s the WSJ account:
The Health and Human Services department startled drug makers last year when the agency said it would start invoking a little-used administrative policy under the Social Security Act against pharmaceutical executives. This policy allows officials to bar corporate leaders from health-industry companies doing business with the government, if a drug company is guilty of criminal misconduct. The agency said a chief executive or other leader can be banned even if he or she had no knowledge of a company’s criminal actions. Retaining a banned executive can trigger a company’s exclusion from government business.
Can you imagine the administration using this tactic against health IT firms, unions, the New Black Panthers, ACORN, or investment banks? For different reasons for each, the answer is “No.”
Health IT firms are the favorite sons of HHS, the New Black Panthers, of municipal officials who milk pension funds and funnel money to their pet projects, unions are — well enough said — and investment banks would never be touched because that would trigger panic in the bond markets upon which the administration relies to finance the mounting debt.
So picking on the CEO of a company that has already paid out $300 million in fines to avoid a government lawsuit regarding marketing practices makes political sense, even if Pharma supported Obamacare. My guess is that it will lead companies to be much less likely to make products available to government programs. Or maybe the administration will force sales at specific prices in exchange for a “promise” not to rough up CEOs. That is as close to government extortion as one can get. This, from an administration that promised to be more business friendly.
Meanwhile the threat against Forest and its CEO is more draconian than actions the Obama administration is taking against Assad. The dictator who has slaughtered his people, aided Iran, built a uranium-enrichment facility, staged the Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon, and whose country is soon to be part of the UN Human Rights Council has received a stern warning from the president but nothing more.
As for the administration’s toothless response to Assad (well captured by the brilliant Barry Rubin) note how an administration official in quoted in the New York Times on these points:
Administration officials say that while they lack many effective economic tools, they believe Mr. Assad is sensitive to portrayals of his regime as brutal and backward. “He sees himself as a Westernized leader,” one senior administration official said, “and we think he’ll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators.”
Is this for real? How cannot one be sarcastic and hypercritical when leading U.S. officials think that a ruthless dictator — in fact, the most cleverly ruthless dictator in the Arabic-speaking world — really cares if people in the West say mean things about him.”
The administration only picks on people and enterprises it can bully for show, without thinking through the consequences. Meanwhile it avoids taking on real evil or illegal activity when it suits the political goal of the moment and fits those naive narratives shaping the administration’s actions. Forest and its CEO paid their debt in full. The effort to can Solomon is gangster government that serves a short-term political purpose while the administration’s inaction towards Syria emboldens a chief executive of whom Rubin writes:
It would be impossible to find someone more eager to be a brutal dictator and who does not see himself as a Westernized leader. If this were the “Godfather,” Bashar would be Michael, not Fredo.
If the Obama Administration doesn’t understand this, it understands nothing. Yes, that’s the point. It understands nothing.
About the Author
Robert M. Goldberg is vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and founder of Hands Off My H ealth, a grass roots health care empowerment network. His is new book, Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used To Hijack Medical Science For Fear and Profit, was published last month by Kaplan.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (9) | Leave a comment
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Michael Tomlinson| 5.3.11 @ 7:37AM
I'm sure a little greasing of the Obama's paws would make this go away -- you know the Chicago way.
WJ| 5.3.11 @ 8:47AM
What the .... does Obama's treatment of drug company CEOs have to do with anti-Israel dictators?
Does anybody else see the absolute inanity of this post?
Is TAS totally going off the deep end?
Jack London| 5.3.11 @ 9:50AM
So you noticed - 95% of the content here is unhinged. The other 5% is totally insane. As for the comments, reverse these figures.
Dan Hirsch| 5.4.11 @ 9:25AM
WJ, Jack;
What is unhinged or insane about pointing out extortion practiced by the Obama Executive Branch, which this demand that a corporation remove one of its chosen officers as a condition of doing business in a market that the government is clearly taking over.
What is insane and unhinged is claiming that those objecting to a clear threat to the consititutionally guaranteed freedom of association that this government extortionate act represents is either insane or unhinged.
Declaring those who disagree as insane was a well established communist tactic. Are you aware of this?
First they came for the Jews...
Mr. Goldberg is simply identifying the canary in the coal mine that Forest represents.
The hinges are clear to me. Maybe you should read a little more carefully, then think. You'll get it if you mean to.
crooked wren| 5.3.11 @ 9:18AM
It is gangsta' govt. these days.
If you suck up to HHS and Obama, you, too, can get a waiver to be stuck in ObamaCare Hell -- at least until after you reelect him in 2012. Then, well, we'll see who gets waivers after.
We'll see -- 'cause the Republicans haven't got a candidate yet who can win. Not that I see, anyway.
Mark Steyn said that we don't need a great leader -- that the desire for such comes from a monarchical urge. I think he's right. We need a good President,not a beneficent "king." (That's close to what we've got right now. A grad student who thinks he's THE beneficent "king" of his "classroom" -- one who is all-knowing and who will only put up with so much nonsense in his classroom. Though I will say, making that decision on Bin Laden means that somewhere along the line, he's decided he needs to act like a grown-up President.)
Whatever happened to the government that stayed out of private business? Whatever happened to the government that when legislation passed, everyone (except, of course, for the lawmakers themselves -- but everyone else) had to follow the law? No one used to get WAIVERS from following the law.
Now the law -- passed via Reconciliation instead of the Constitutionally mandated process -- that destroys our healthcare system -- is so burdensome that HHS is letting some folks worm out it.
Why? We all know why: 2012.
Now what does THAT have to do with the CEO?
THIS ADMINISTRATION IGNORES THE BOUNDARIES SET BY THE LAW. WE ALL KNOW IT. WE DO NOTHING ABOUT IT.
crooked wren| 5.3.11 @ 9:37AM
Oh, yes, and please read about the Tahrir Square salad -- just click on the link in the article.
It's terrible how secular humanism and Marxism have tainted the sacred in our lives.
A true man of faith in the secular state, our President celebrated a humanist/Marxist Seder, one that emphasizes not the Acts of God, but the acts of humanity. (Please read the essay prior to the salad recipe. You'll understand what I'm referring to.)
I knew that the Communists/Marxists had infiltrated Christianity, bringing liberation theology out of the jungles of South America and into the sacred liturgy of the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian, the Methodist churches (and others, I'm sure).
I surmised (correctly, I think) that they must also have infiltrated Islam -- and deduced (or is it induced?) -- that THAT is why we have jihadists for the first time in centuries. (The Communists never have cared much for the Jews. So many Russian Jews fled the Soviet Union, the Communists lost a number of easy scapegoats.)
But what I have trouble understanding most is the Jewish leftist. There are so many of them. (And before you accuse me of anti-Semitism, I want you to know my first husband was Jewish, not practicing but by birth -- and two of my sons are half-Jewish, non-practicing -- like their father -- and left-leaning, like their father).
DRed| 5.3.11 @ 12:53PM
What does the salad have to do with anything?
Smirking Weasel| 5.3.11 @ 1:46PM
Corporate bureaucrats are a far bigger threat to the vast majority of Americans than dictators of foreign nations. Goldberg apparently knows nothing of Americans daily lives, but much of 'free
market' propaganda-in the case of large, publically traded corporations, its' propaganda.
JeffT| 5.5.11 @ 9:16PM
"Corporate bureaucrats are..." Right. And look at all those people killed by Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Fed-Ex. Why, there are just thousands of corpses lining the aisles of my Wal-Mart, alone. Can you imagine how many have been slaughtered while shopping at all 3,100 Wal-Mart stores. Weasel, you've been watching too many PBS specials and network and cable crime shows, where every bad guy runs a business.