Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18903

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Publication type: Electronic Source

Niles S
Election has implications for pharmaceutical marketing
Med Ad News Insider 2010 Nov 3
http://blog.medadnews.com/index.php/2010/11/03/election-has-implications-for-pharmaceutical-marketing

Full text:

Washington is dealing with another case of whiplash following yesterday’s election results. To get a sense of what the new Republican control of the House of Representatives might mean for pharmaceutical marketing and advertising, I caught up with John Kamp, executive director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication.

Earlier this year I had interviewed Mr. Kamp for our Podcast series, The Med Ad News Show. In that discussion, we talked at length about how the pharmaceutical industry narrowly avoided an elimination of the marketing expense tax exemption in the healthcare reform bill. Mr. Kamp talked about how he believes that the idea remains popular in Washington and could rear its head again with potentially devastating effect for the healthcare communications industry.

In light of yesterday’s events, that idea could have more life than ever. The country is clearly deficit obsessed, so this will be a key issue for politicians in the coming year.

“The deficit is going to be something everybody from the Tea Partiers to even the far Left are going to focus on,” Mr. Kamp told Med Ad News. “And nobody is going to want to raise personal taxes between now and the presidential election, so there are going to have to be taxes on businesses. But nobody is interested in taxing business either in the middle of a ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ economy. So there isn’t a lot of room.”

Every possible source of revenue is going to be on the agenda, and the revenue that could come from eliminating the tax deductibility of marketing costs could be enticing.

As far as the healthcare reform legislation itself is concerned, Mr. Kamp does not expect attempts to repeal will have much traction in the short term. “Last night’s vote means that nobody is going to control either house,” he says. “The only thing they’re going to control is the gavel. They won’t control the votes. Every vote is going to have to be bi-partisan, and I don’t smell a lot of bi-partisanship happening today. The idea that somebody could, in that context, totally reverse the healthcare reform vote and not get it vetoed by the President is just not going to happen.”

Some Republican ideas that Mr. Kamp expects could garner some Democratic support include the possibility of tort reform, enabling of low-cost insurance policies for low-income workers, and insurance reform that allows insurance competition across state lines.

One of the major changes will be the fact that Henry Waxman will no longer be chairman of the House Commerce Committee. “That means we’ll have less noise from him,” Mr. Kamp says.

Mr. Kamp cautions, however, that this does not mean Republicans will necessarily be PhRMA’s best friend. “PhRMA enabled healthcare reform, working with the Democratic president,” he says. “There’s going to be some old bad feelings there. I’ve heard, for example, that the new speaker of the house, John Boehner, is very upset with PhRMA as an institution.”

Overall, Mr. Kamp believes that industry will need to remain vigilant in light of the election results. “It’s a mix,” he says. “The battles that were fought last year will be part of the context of the battles next year.”