The GOP-oriented Hill, apparently didn't feel it was necessary to identify the lying sack of shit, Mia Palmieri Heck, whose naked propaganda they published as an OpEd they published this morning, as a former infamous operative for right-wing bill mill ALEC and a Trump HHS ex-staffer tasked with burrowing into Medicare and Medicaid and destroying them from within. They just ran her distorted anti-healthcare piece, Can we really afford to change Medicare Part D?, as if it were written by a normal person. They simply described her as "the vice president for External Affairs and Healthcare Fellow at the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy," without explaining that the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy is an arm of ALEC.
The giveaway comes in the beginning of the third paragraph: "Since its implementation in 2006, Medicare Part D has been a successful and popular program among seniors." Seniors, like myself, love Medicare... except for Medicare Part D, the Republican version of Medicare, stuck onto Medicare to benefit pharmaceutical companies, not patients. It prevents Medicare from negotiating fair market-value prices for medicines and allows pharmceutical companies to inflate the price of drugs so that in many cases Americans don't pay double or triple for drugs but ten times what people in other countries pay. Corporate whores like Palmieri Heck spend their lives keeping that corrupt system in place while Big PhRMA pays for their cushy lifestyles. Billy Tauzin (Blue Dog scumbag-turned-Republican scumbag-LA), who shepherded Part D through Congress for Bush, retired from Congress right after and was giving a $2 million a year job by Big PhRMA, a deal that was negotiated while he was getting their bill passed. He not only isn't in prison, he hasn't even been charged with anything to do with this obvious case of bribery. Had Medicare not been prohibited from negotiating drug prices, from 2006 to 2013, the U.S. would have saved between $332 billion and, according too Joseph Stigliz, $563 billion at least.
The entire Republican Party plus Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), Ed Case (Blue Dog-HI), Scott Peters (New Dem-CA), Lou Correa (Blue Dog-CA), Kathleen Rice (New Dem-NY), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-CA), Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL), Carolyn Bourdeaux (Blue Dog-GA), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA) and several other bribe-taking Blue Dogs and New Dems just prevented Bernie and Biden from finally reforming this predatory drug pricing system that robs seniors blind.
As you can probably guess, Palmieri Heck's propaganda piece for The Hill is about keeping the cost of drugs high, something not evenRepublican voters agree with. This poll from last month shows that 73% of Americans agree that Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices, including 83% of Democrats, 71% of independents and 65% of Republicans.
The corporate-whore perspective is a long series of lies-- like lower prices will limit seniors’ access to medicines-- meant to persuade seniors that Medicare Part D is their friend. It isn't-- and neither are conservatives from either political party, The Hill or Mia Palmieri Heck. By the way, if you want to get revenge on Blue Dogs who helped force Biden to remove lower drug prices from Build Back Better, please contribute to Sergio Alcubilla, Mike Ortega, Jamie McLeod-Skinner and Jessica Cisneros, who are campaigning for seats held by Blue Dogs Ed Case, Lou Correa, Kurt Schrader and Henry Cuellar. Just click here and give what you can to all 4 or to one or to any combination you want. Drug prices will keep going up-- instead of down-- as long as we have corrupt reactionaries like Case, Correa, Schrader and Cuellar in Congress. Is it worth it to you to help in the hard task of replacing them?