How PhRMA finally lost: the inside story of the group’s biggest lobbying failure in years
WASHINGTON —The drug industry’s storied lobbying group isn’t accustomed to bad news — and with its small army of well-connected advocates, it’s even less familiar with surprises.
For PhRMA, the news last winter was both.
On Feb. 7, the group’s board — made up of dozens of the CEOs of major pharmaceutical companies including Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, and Sanofi — was gathered for a meeting to welcome its new chairman. Suddenly, the gathered crew had something far more threatening to discuss: Congress had just laid out a plan to force drug makers to pay far more into Medicare — a policy change none of pharma’s lobbyists had seen coming.
A source familiar with what happened at the meeting described the atmosphere succinctly: panic.
The group — its board members, its 30 internal lobbyists, and its 150 contracted ones — sprung into action, scrambling to convince Congress not to enact the change. That two-day blitzkrieg was only the first in a series of sustained campaigns to find a way to reverse its loss — campaigns that saw the powerful group make concessions on policies it otherwise opposed and even reach out to would-be adversaries.
But all that maneuvering was for naught. On Tuesday, it became official: A change took effect that will cost the industry nearly $12 billion over the next 10 years.
“This might well be the biggest political loss that PhRMA has suffered in a decade,” Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, told STAT.
Read more: The drug industry is headed back to Congress to make its case. Will Democrats keep the door open?
STAT spoke with key members of Congress, congressional staffers, experts, and lobbyists both within the drug industry and outside it to piece together the inside story of how the drug industry finally lost — big — in Washington. The account, some of which is reported here for the first time, details just how flat-footed PhRMA was caught by the policy, how it spun together multiple lobbying strategies to advance its “fix,”
