Medicare

As the prospect of a US Democratic party onslaught on brand-name drugmakers nears, with the change of control in both houses of Congress taking effect this month, "many of the most onerous ideas they have pushed appear to have been taken off the table," according to analysts at Lehman Brothers.

Even as the Democrats were celebrating their comprehensive victory in November last year, the Washington Post, one of the USA's two leading liberal-inclined newspapers, warned against interfering with the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. In an editorial, the Post noted that the program "actually turned out to be cheaper than projected" (Marketletter November 13, 2006).

In December, the Washington DC-headquartered conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, targeted the Democrats' Medicare reform plans, issuing a three-page memo for politicians and the media, backed up with a longer research paper. Greg D'Angelo, a researcher at the Heritage's Center for Health Policy Studies, countered the proposal to authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate prices directly as a single purchaser, or monopsony, with drugmakers for the supply of their products, arguing that it would not work.