If the Supreme Court overturns the
health care reform act, PhRMA may have to try to reconstruct the
innovator-friendly biosimilar pathway that became law with ACA in 2010.
The base for that law was built on a strong set of alliances with labor
unions. Is PhRMA keeping those ties strong or losing sight of them in
the effort to refocus on the more traditional alliances with patient and
disease advocacy groups?
The silence in response to a question from the audience at the PhRMA annual meeting in Boston was awkward and almost painful.
The first question to a panel on the “Innovation Ecosystem” came from Fred Mason (president of the Maryland and DC AFL-CIO).
Noting that Maryland Governor Martin
O’Malley (D) had been a speaker at the PhRMA annual meeting in 2011 in
part because of his state’s creation of a $100 million venture capital
fund called InvestMaryland, Mason pointed out that “organized labor
supported that addition because we thought it was a good investment and
because it creates the jobs in the sector.”
Mason followed up with a question: “How
are we going to make sure that those small startup companies that were
invested in by the state of Maryland, when they are sold to larger
concerns, that there is some return for the state?”
There was an extended period of silence
from the four-person panel and the moderator. No answer; and then a
call for “next question.”
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