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AMERICA’S SCARIEST DRUG DEALER |
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Written by SONIA SHAH
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Tuesday, 16 January 2007 |
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Billy Tauzin / CEO, Pharmaceutical Researchand Manufacturers of AmericaFormer Congressman Billy Tauzin has never found it diffi cult to switch sides.In 1995, after15 years serving as one of Louisiana’s Democraticrepresentative, the Cajun Charmer jumped ship for the GOP, which soon installed
him as head of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.
In 2001, with $218,000 from drug companies nestled in his campaign coffers,Tauzin engineered the industry-friendly Medicare drug benefi t,which prohibits the government from using its vast buying power tonegotiate lower prices from drugmakers. Once the bill passed in 2003— after some highly irregular late-night arm twisting—Tauzin soon bid adieu to Congress for a cushy, $2 million-ayear job as CEO of the industry’s trade association, PhRMA. There he clinks champagne glasses with the nation’s top drugmakers,wallowing in a decade-long, $320-billion windfall selling overpriced drugs to Medicare patients.No sympathy from Tauzin—a cancer survivor himself—for those sickly senior citizens compelled to shuffl e onto buses to Canada to buy affordable medicines: according to Tauzin, these unfortunates are no better than Al-Qaeda conspirators“opening our borders…to future terrorist attacks.” Nexium, anyone?—SONIA SHAH, author of The Body Hunters: How the Drug
Industry Tests Its Products on the World’s Poorest Patients
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Conspiracy Facts |
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Political Scandal |
http://www.oldtroutmag.com/docs/13ScariestAmericans.pdf.
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