Swiss pharmaceutical giants Roche and Novartis are spending millions of dollars in an effort to influence United States politicians tackling health care reform.The companies are among the top ten drug manufacturers lobbying the White House and Congress, having spent upwards of $7 million (SFr7.05 million) combined during the first half of 2009 to influence policy.
Roche, Novartis and other groups lobbying Washington spent a total of nearly $400 million lobbying lawmakers on health care reform, President Barack Obama's biggest domestic priority. Congress is currently working on several bills that tackle the issue.
"This year could be a record in the history of lobbying," said David Levinthal, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan research group based in the US capital that tracks money and its effects on elections and politics.
In Congress, Representative Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat and co-chair of the Friends of Switzerland Caucus, acknowledges that pharmaceutical and health insurance companies are a force to contend with.
"Their lobbyists are very active and present in the House and Senate," she said. "They try to get meetings, they seek to persuade, they are more vocal and have a lot more resources than the proponents of a universal system and public health insurance."
Joseph Jimenez of Novartis Better than insurers
"Our health system is largely based on profit and many people are making good money from it," Baldwin said. "That is why there is great resistance to change."
But if media coverage is focused on insurance company efforts to block a fundamental overhaul, it appears that the drug companies are doing more than insurers in terms of lobbying.
In this game, the two Swiss drug manufacturers are playing a lead role.
Roche was the fifth most active pharmaceutical company in Washington and the first most active foreign drug maker to try to woo the US government during the first half of 2009.
Other companies such as Sanofi-Aventis (France), Merck (Germany), Bayer (Germany) and GlaxoSmithKline (Britain) are also among the top lobbyists. Novartis ranks tenth.
Efforts to pay
Roche declined to comment, but the global head of pharmaceuticals at Novartis, Joe Jimenez, stressed that Novartis "supports the initiatives of the Obama administration to expand coverage and improve quality of care for all Americans".
Jimenez said the pharmaceutical industry had made a "significant commitment" to reduce costs of the US system, the world's most expensive, especially since drug prices are 40-60 per cent higher than in other developed countries.
"We reached an agreement with the White House and the Senate that we will return $80 billion over ten years in the form of discounts to patients covered by Medicaid and Medicare, public programmes for the poor and those over 65," he said.
The effort seems somewhat relative, however, since the US accounts for half of the global pharmaceutical market, with annual sales close to $300 billion.
The drug companies' lobbying efforts appear to be paying off in other ways, too. No bill being debated in Congress provides for a cap on drug prices. None proposes to reduce how long a company can hold a patent, which keeps generic manufactures from making the same drug for less.
Defending Novartis
Consumer advocates blame pharmaceutical companies for trying to preserve the status quo. Roche spent more than $4 million on lobbying efforts during the first half of 2009. Novartis spent more than $3 million during the same period.
"These companies are concerned about their turnover and wish to keep prices as high as they want," Levinthal said. "So far in the health care reform debate, they have got what they wanted."
Novartis, for its part, contends that prices in the US reflect production costs and allow for further research.
"We invest 20 per cent of our turnover in research, and when people accuse us of only being concerned with revenue, we say that we are protecting our investment and we ensure that innovation is rewarded," Jimenez said. "Otherwise, the number of medicines being developed will be reduced and science won't advance."
Marie-Christine Bonzom in Washington, swissinfo.ch (Translated from French by Tim Neville)
