Pfizer leaving US unsettles drug lobbyists

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has long been the most politically active drug maker in Washington, and its representatives have tended to wrap themselves in the American flag while pressing their concerns with lawmakers and regulators. So when the company announced this week that it would abandon not only the flag but the United States, its planned move to Ireland stunned the medicine industry's lobbying corps - not the least because Pfizer's chief lobbyist, Sally Susman, is the daughter of one of President Obama's biggest, most generous benefactors, Louis Susman.

Susman, a former Clinton administration staff member and a major fund-raiser in her own right for Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, must now make the argument to Washington that cutting her company's tax contributions to the United States Treasury by moving its headquarters to Dublin is actually good for the United States.

Obama's Treasury Department has twice changed tax rules to dissuade such "corporate inversions," and Republicans and Democrats alike - from the president to the new speaker of the House, Paul D Ryan - have pressed for a tax-code rewrite to thwart them.

"Ironically, an inversion makes it easier for an American company to invest in the US and less likely that it will be encumbered by competitive tax disadvantages - or acquired by a foreign competitor," Susman, Pfizer's executive vice president for policy, external affairs and communications, said in an emailed statement Wednesday that echoed those made in phone calls by her boss, Ian C Read, Pfizer's Scottish-born chief executive.

It is a talking point that six veteran lobbyists for other pharmaceutical companies and organisations said was causing the industry serious heartburn. "This Pfizer thing is humongous, and I think it could change the course of history for the entire industry," one of the industry's top lobbyists said in an interview. "Pfizer shot us all in the collective foot."

The lobbyists asked for anonymity since criticising Pfizer or the industry's present position in Washington could get them fired.

The pharmaceutical industry was once the world's most profitable, its companies topping lists of the world's most admired corporations and Washington's lists of its most influential. The industry has for years invested more in lobbying than any other.

But a series of criminal cases, multibillion-dollar fines and other scandals has diminished its reputation, and its prices - the last 10 cancer drugs approved before July 2015 have an average annual price of $190,217 - are again becoming a major political issue. Even with discounts and insurance coverage, a growing number of Americans find themselves choosing between their lives and lifetime savings.

"We're on the wane. There's just too much obvious greed," said another veteran lobbyist for a major drug maker, citing Turing Pharmaceuticals' overnight price increase on a 62-year-old drug to $750 a tablet from $13.50. "Everybody in the industry is talking about this."

The White House has begun building a political case for reining in drug costs, and the administration recently agreed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord to intellectual property protections for advanced pharmaceuticals that was about half of what the industry demanded and United States law provides. Worse, a 2011 patent law has resulted in a wave of lawsuits funded by hedge funds against the industry's most valuable property - drug patents. In years past, according to interviews with longtime industry lobbyists, such problems could have been fixed by a vigorous lobbying push. No more.

The last time the industry's prices and other practices raised significant concerns in Washington, drug makers decided that the solution was to increase the share of patients who had health insurance so that more people had help buying drugs.

So in 2009, the industry rallied around President Obama's push for the Affordable Care Act, striking an $80 billion deal with the administration that even led the industry to fund an advertising campaign supporting the law.

©2015 The New York Times News Service