Robert Weissman
Robert Weissman is the President of Public Citizen.[1]
Bio
From the Public Citizen website:[2]
- Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen and a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on corporate and government accountability. He is available to discuss the effect of money on politics, economic and regulatory policy, corporate crime and wrongdoing, trade and globalization, financial reform, prescription drug pricing and access to the courts. He worked as director of the corporate accountability organization Essential Action from 1995 to 2009. From 1989 to 2009, he was editor of the Multinational Monitor, a magazine that tracked multinational corporations. Weissman helped make HIV drugs available to the developing world and has provided assistance to numerous governments on intellectual property and access to medicine issues. He previously worked as a public interest attorney at the Center for Study of Responsive Law. A member of the Ohio bar, Weissman earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude.
- Weissman has appeared on CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, CNBC, NPR and Marketplace Radio, and has been published and quoted in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Time.
Medicare for All launch
With wide backing from unions and citizens groups, and majority public support, the Congressional Progressive Caucus formally unveiled its comprehensive Medicare For All legislation.
Surrounded by more than 100 backers at a Feb. 27 outdoor Capitol Hill press conference, from National Nurses United (NNU), the Center for Popular Democracy and Our Revolution, a parade of lawmakers, led by caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., pitched the fight over the new legislation, HR1384, in human, justice and financial terms.
They said it would save people money they now pay on health insurers’ co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs, save businesses money they fork over to the insurers for declining coverage for their workers, and save U.S. health care spending by letting doctors and nurses treat patients before their conditions worsen.
“Thirty people die every day in America because they lack health care coverage,” said one backer, Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. After 150 hearings and events NNU held nationwide, the union concluded “people across this country want real reform, now,” said union Executive Director Bonnie Castillo.
“For all the people suffering from illness in the U.S., this (legislation) is for you,” Jayapal said.
The measure has more than 100 House co-sponsors already. Besides NNU, initial union backers include the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Teachers (AFT), the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Postal Workers and the Flight Attendants-CWA.
Other union backers include the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees-Teamsters, the Theatrical and State Employees, the Professional and Technical Engineers, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, the New York State Nurses Association, the Service Employees, the United Electrical Workers and, for the first time ever, the Machinists.
“We know we must take this on now,” AFT President Randi Weingarten declared at the press conference. “Health care costs have become an issue in every collective bargaining agreement for two decades – and an issue in the recent teachers’ strikes.”[3]
Anti-Pharma Bill
November 2018, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna unveiled a new bill that would direct the secretary of Health and Human Services to authorize generic competition for any name-brand drug whose average domestic cost exceeds the median price in five reference countries: Canada, the U.K., Germany, France and Japan.
“The government is giving an exclusive monopoly to pharmaceuticals,” Khanna told HuffPost. “If a company abuses that grant by fleecing American consumers, then they lose that privilege, that property grant, that subsidy from the government.”
If the bill — dubbed The Prescription Drug Price Relief Act — were to become law, experts anticipate that drug companies would dramatically reduce prices rather than risk ceding market share to a generic competitor. “No company would want to lose its legal monopoly as a consequence of charging U.S. residents prices higher than in the reference countries,” said Jamie Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that specializes in intellectual property issues.
The bill from Sanders and Khanna isn’t going to become law anytime soon. It faces fervent opposition from Republicans, who will still control the Senate when Congress reconvenes next year. Even getting a vote in the House will depend on whether the Democrats in charge of key committees decide to greenlight it ― a choice that will likely depend at least in part on the whims of top leadership.
But the legislation nevertheless sends a statement about the priorities of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its intent to deliver on the campaign promises Democrats issued around the 2018 midterms, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s election night pledge to “take real, very, very strong legislative action to negotiate down the price control of prescription drugs.”
Pharmaceutical firms typically argue that long-term monopolies are necessary to justify the money they spend on research and development. And major drug companies do spend billions of dollars a year on R&D ― but not nearly as much as they spend on marketing, meaning that most of the costs recouped by monopoly profits aren’t essential to groundbreaking science. Nearly all research funded by pharmaceutical companies, moreover, piggybacks on government-backed research conducted by the National Institutes of Health. One study published earlier this year concluded that every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016 relied on at least some government-funded research, reflecting over $100 billion of public investment.
“American consumers pay far too much for drugs, not because it is costly to manufacture them, or even because of the expense of research and development,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a public interest nonprofit. “We pay too much because the U.S. government grants patents and other monopolies to brand-name drug makers, and then stands aside as Big Pharma exploits those monopolies to price gouge.”
The United States is in a class by itself on prescription drug costs, but the five reference countries included in the Sanders bill are a relatively generous comparison pool. Three of them ― Germany, Japan and Canada ― are in the top five in per-capita pharmaceutical spending among OECD nations. International reference pricing is common among wealthy nations, with 29 of 31 European Union nations taking foreign drug prices into account when considering domestic price policy, according to the European Commission.
Patents on prescription drugs are a longstanding feature of both American law and international trade agreements, in part due to the outsized influence of the pharmaceutical lobby within the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. But international law provides various exceptions patent-holders’ privileges when it comes to public health ― which is why so many countries party to the World Trade Organization and other trade treaties can obtain lower drug prices than the U.S. does. Though Khanna and Sanders crafted their bill to crack down on the monopoly, the legislation would not technically violate a drug company’s patent ― just change the legal substance of what that patent secured.
“Drug corporations charge us hundreds of thousands of dollars for a drug that was created with taxpayer dollars because they can,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, a nonprofit that works extensively with Medicare costs and access. “We don’t have to let them rip us off.”[4]
'Rockville Resistance'
From Stephen Melkisethian on Flickr:[5]
- Rockville Maryland, the evening of July 10, 2017. A packed house of over 150 local activists and supporters gathered at Johns Hopkins Gilchrist Hall Auditorium for a panel symposium titled "The For-Profit Presidency: Ethical Issues In The Trump Administration And What We Can Do About Them." The ethics outrages of the Trump regime are numerous, egregious and well known to all, even Republicans. The solutions proposed involve using every one of the institutions of our Democracy from the highest courts to your local street protest. Inside/Outside, long game. The event was organized by the social justice group Rockville Resistance that sprung up, like so many others, in the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States Of America. The distinguished panel included Georgetown history professor and Dissent magazine editor Michael Kazin, Public Citizen Director Robert Weissman, Executive Branch Ethics Counsel and CREW* stalwart Virginia Cantor and Stephen Spaulding from the venerable good government advocacy group Common Cause. Our House Representative Jamie Raskin cancelled due to illness and was backed up very ably by Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh. Hats off to all at Rockville Resistance for staging this important event. We fight on.