What a difference six years makes. In August 2009, the Obama White House was busy negotiating closed-door deals with special interests to get them to support Obamacare. Former Rep. Billy Tauzin (D-LA), then head of the pharmaceutical manufacturers’ trade lobby, bragged to the New York Times: “We were assured [by the administration] ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal.’”

The contrast presents one of two possibilities: Either Clinton, like Obama, will renege on her campaign promises while in office and leave Big Pharma alone—or, rather than showing preference to special interests, will instead use government to squeeze their businesses.

Compare the backroom dealings between Big Pharma and the Obama administration with developments yesterday. A tweet by former Senator Hillary Clinton decried “price gouging” by manufacturers and pledged that the plan she will release today will stop “outrageous” pricing, causing pharmaceutical stock prices to tumble. The contrast presents one of two possibilities: Either Clinton, like Obama, will renege on her campaign promises while in office and leave Big Pharma alone—or, rather than showing preference to special interests, will instead use government to squeeze their businesses.

Price Controls and Government “Negotiation”

Clinton has yet to release details of her proposals on drug costs, but the media is already reporting that her plan will likely contain elements of a policy paper released yesterday by the Center for American Progress (CAP). The CAP plan includes sections on increasing transparency of pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) spending and expanding research into the comparative effectiveness of various treatment options.

Those proposals might sound simple enough, but they come with big catches. As is usually the case, liberals propose transparency not for its own sake, but as a cudgel with which to bully private enterprise. In this case, CAP proposes price controls: “If drug companies do not invest a minimum amount of money in R&D, require them to pay a refund to the National Institutes of Health.” Likewise, the paper suggests that drug companies should charge “reasonable rates,” as determined by outside “experts”; if prices fall “outside the recommended range, require public justifications and license patents that result from federally funded research to competitors.”

In short, the CAP plan—likely to resemble the Clinton plan—would:

Force drug companies to turn over proprietary material about the R&D costs associated with specific drugs; Subject that R&D spending to government-established price controls;

Establish a board of technocrats—ostensibly independent, but likely to be influenced by both government and lobbyists—to set “recommended” prices; and

If manufacturers do not comply with the “recommended” price levels, subject those products to additional “public justifications”—read: opportunities for political posturing and demagoguery—and/or remove the patent exclusivity for those products, and allow other companies to manufacture generic versions.

As noted above, transparency alone brings with it numerous benefits to consumers. Health care markets have a notoriously opaque reputation. More independent research on what treatments work best will put more knowledge and power in the hands of patients.

But Consumer Reports-style research is one thing and price controls another. Creating an environment where a technocratic entity—one similar to Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)—can determine the prices for an entire industry consolidates a troubling amount of power in one place. Moreover, precision medicine will likely make medical treatments much more personalized to each specific patient’s genome; creating a centralized price-setting body runs contrary to the progress medicinal science is making. The greater specificity of treatment patients are offered, the less conducive these practices will become to a uniform bureaucratic standard of cost.

Obamacare Process Not Transparent

The CAP paper’s focus on drugmakers’ transparency carries with it a particular irony. In 2008, then-Senator Obama pledged that “we’ll have the [health care] negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” Of course, that promised transparency never materialized—and Big Pharma benefited immensely from those closed-door negotiations.

Yesterday, Senator Clinton said that she was “so proud to be part of the Obama administration” when the president signed Obamacare into law. But a cabinet member of an administration that threw away many of its promises to help a special interest group has little right to come back and complain about the resulting privileges of that group. And likewise, members of Big Pharma outraged about the Clinton proposals should remember that conservatives warned them about the implications of their Faustian bargain at the time they made it. Therefore, given the history of this administration, both Hillary Clinton and the pharmaceutical industry would be wise to keep their own self-righteousness on this issue in check—for neither one comes to this debate with clean hands. (For more from the author of “Democrats and Big Pharma: Hypocrisy You Can Believe In?” please click HERE)

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At what point does the millennial generation wake up and realize that their love affair with the Democratic Party has been one-sided? While the Democrats have benefitted enormously from millennials’ overwhelming support of their brand in national, state and local elections, the affection has gone unrequited. Granted, the Democrats talk a big game about the youth of America, but it’s what they’re actually doing to younger Americans that matters. In nearly every significant policy arena the modern, far-Left Democratic Party is pushing policies that will undoubtedly jeopardize the futures of young Americans working hard to make a better tomorrow.

Conservative activist, former Reagan administration official, and nationally-syndicated radio host Mark Levin’s new book Plunder and Deceit is a thorough examination of the ideological and legislative assault on young Americans. The book uses extensive data points and a second-to-none analysis to make the case that the modern Democratic Party’s allegiance to liberal ideology on the social front, and to tax-and-spend economics on the fiscal front, is selling out young Americans. It is a must-read for young Americans who are looking to escape the Democratic Party’s deceptive, focus group tested talking points and looking to find the truth. Additionally, the book is a must-read for Americans of all ages who want to understand, and be able to explain to open-minded young Americans, the danger we are in if we fail to correct our course.

What is perhaps most disturbing about this disconnect between what the modern Democratic Party says to young Americans, and what it does to them, is that it’s not simply that the Democrats are failing to help the youth in our society, but that they are deliberately harming them. After reading Levin’s book and being reminded of the grave economic future being created by the Obama administration, their congressional allies, and weak-knee’d Republicans too cowardly to fight back, I wonder where young Americans think the money to pay off the growing national debt, which is equal to the value of everything the country produces, is going to come from? There is no significant difference between annual deficits, accumulated government debt, and taxes coming out of your pocket, absent the time preference. And the modern Democratic Party prefers to burden young Americans with the debt and spending they are accumulating right now, rather than to govern responsibly, due to their continued quest for the consolidation of government economic power. This allegiance to the broken economics of unsustainable government debt, is not just failing to provide young Americans with the promised “hope and change,” but it is unquestionably doing significant damage to the potential prosperity of young Americans hoping for a bright economic future.

Facts matter and the facts are not on the side of the modern Democratic Party. The laws of both arithmetic and economics dictate that all debts both public and private must be paid. Those debts are either paid by the debtor, who fulfills his obligation to pay back the debt, or the creditor, who unwillingly pays the debt himself when he fails to receive the money he loaned back from the debtor. There is no third way, these are the only options. With these hard facts in mind, it’s clear there are only a couple of options for young Americans going forward if we do not begin to control the federal government’s profligate spending. The first option for young Americans is a future of confiscatory tax rates so high that they will choke off any chance that they can live economically prosperous lives in an increasingly shrinking private sector future. Our unsustainable and growing national debt, with its entitlement promises and grim discretionary spending outlook, will strangle private sector opportunity in favor of public sector thievery.

The second option is just as disturbing for young Americans. The federal government can simply ignore its accumulated debt obligations and fail to repay its creditors, both foreign and domestic. This disastrous scenario would destroy the economic credibility of the world’s greatest supporter and dramatically increase the cost of debt in the future. Young Americans need to understand that this means that their car loans, their home loans, their credit card interest rates, and any other attempt to finance their lifestyles, or their futures, with debt will be dramatically more expensive than it was for their parents. You can thank the big spenders in elected positions in our government for this disparity between what your parent’s lifestyle was, and what yours is going to be.

Yes young America, you are being screwed, big time. It’s easy to make the faux “tough choices” to pile on government debt today, when cowardly politicians, and their silent opposition, anchor the costs of those “tough choices” to my children and yours, who will pay for them for decades.

For the sake of the country and its future, I am hoping that Levin’s book becomes the centerpiece of a long overdue national discussion about what our real “priorities” are as a nation. I refuse to accept that the greatest country in the history of mankind, when confronted with the hard facts in Levin’s book, will choose the route of a profligate present, and a bankrupt future for their children, rather than a responsible present and a prosperous future. (Re-posted with permission from the author, “Dear Millennials, the Dems Are Screwing You”, originally appeared HERE)

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