'Biosimilar’ blather was all too similar

The medical industry’s control of Congress isn’t exactly a secret or new. But until this month, health care companies were generally pretty good at hiding the fact that they were the ventriloquists and their pet lawmakers were the other party to that arrangement.

During the debate over health care reform in the House, proxies for Genentech managed to get representatives of all ideological stripes to pretend the company’s words were their own, complete with conversational touches. The New York Times broke the story.

“Let me repeat that for some of my friends on the other side of the aisle,” Rep. Robert Brady said in remarks inserted into the Congressional Record. “This bill will create high-paying, high-quality jobs in health care delivery, technology and research in the United States.”

Those friends actually belonged to a lobbyist from Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, rather than the Pennsylvania Democrat. A lobbyist for Roche subsidiary Genentech, according to The Times, estimates that the company’s boilerplate language was aped by more than 40 congressmen, equally split between the parties.

Sometimes two lawmakers used precisely the same words, as if nobody would notice.

Republican Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Joe Wilson are both quoted thus : “One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country. Unfortunately, many of the largest companies that would seek to enter the biosimilar market have made their money by outsourcing their research to foreign countries like India.”

That Wilson is best known outside his home in South Carolina as the man who shouted “You lie!” at the president during this year’s State of the Union address shows just how blind to irony lawmakers have become.

The Congressional Record is hardly a record of congressional high-mindedness. While it is charged with recording the words spoken on the floor and the actions taken there, it is also a place where lawmakers reward friends with flowery blather.

But Washington has proved unable to do even that with a semblance of honesty. And just to make clear how deeply intertwined lawmakers and their patrons are: Some of the same legislators also received contributions from Genentech’s political action committee and from the lobbyists, according to The Times; the drug-maker’s employees also threw fundraisers.

This is about much more than a company telling a lawmaker what to say; it is about the corruption deeply embedded in the process of lawmaking.

“This happens all the time,” a lobbyist close to Genentech told The Times about the congressional ventriloquism. “There was nothing nefarious about it.”

Oh, there was indeed something nefarious about it. That lobbyists and members of Congress don’t recognize it tells us that Washington is even more lost than anyone thought.