Thursday, October 22, 2009

Another health care expense to eliminate

With a fair wind, Congress should be able to eliminate the anti trust exemption of the health insurance. Al Franken, Sherrod Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse have joined to sponsor a bill to eliminate another public cost in support of private profit.
U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.), along with co-sponsors Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have introduced legislation (S. 1763) to disallow the federal tax deduction for all advertising and marketing expenses for prescription drugs. There are rumblings that the senators would like to have the proposal added to the health-care reform legislation, and the possibility exists that they may offer it as an amendment when the proposed bill is considered by the full Senate.

That would seemingly put in jeopardy the handshake deal that pharmaceutical companies struck earlier this year with the Obama administration and Senate Finance Committee leaders, which calls for drug-makers to pick up an estimated $80 billion in health-care costs over 10 years in exchange for no further crackdowns on the industry.

"From our perspective, that would appear to be the case," said Clark Rector, exec VP-government relations for the American Advertising Federation.

The proposed legislation to eliminate the tax deduction for health-care advertising is going under the short title of the "Protecting Americans from Drug Marketing Act." Mssrs. Franken, Brown and Whitehouse are asking to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 "to deny the deduction for advertising and promotional expenses for prescription pharmaceuticals."
Piece by piece we can dismantle the health care mafia.

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