The Human Services Budget Committee moved to extend old health insurance plans till 2017 on Thursday; killed the bill asking companies to disclose their use of toxic chemicals in toys; and kept alive an amendment designed to protect Eli Lilly from competition, despite misgivings from the legislators on the committee, including Sen. Alan Bates.
In an act of legislative sausage-making, House Bill 4110 passed from the Human Services Budget Committee to a second subcommittee tasked with approving construction projects such as the $200 million financing request from Oregon Health & Science University. The controversial amendment to HB 4110, which would limit the ability for diabetics to receive generic insulin, remained in the bill.
Members of the Human Services Subcommittee were clearly rattled by The Lund Report article that revealed House Majority Leader Val Hoyle, D-Eugene, used her influence to modify HB 4110 on behalf of a political donor, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Her amendment creates an obstacle for pharmacists by requiring them to call physicians for approval before they dispense generic insulin in place of a brand-name drug.
Generic insulin could hit the market as early as next year and save money for diabetics who are now restricted to brand-name drugs from Eli Lilly and others.
House Bill 4110 as it passed out of the House Health Committee requires insurers to pay for medical coverage of their insured population if they are in police custody awaiting trial. But Hoyle inserted an unrelated amendment in the House Rules Committee that redefined generic insulin as a biosimilar medication, which pharmacists are restricted from dispensing under a state law passed last year for Genentech, SB 460.
Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Portland, asked that the Eli Lilly amendment be stripped from the bill, while Rep. Tim Freeman, R-Roseburg, took the counter position, asking that the amendment restricting generic insulin remain intact.
“I would hate to see the underlying bill get killed,” Steiner Hayward said. “I would be very disappointed if the amendment about biosimilars gets left in.”
But the other lawmakers spoke cryptically about the bill and the Eli Lilly amendment.
“It behooves us to learn a lot more,” said Sen. Jackie Winters, R-Salem. “There were things that came out that were very disturbing to me. We count on the information that we were given.”
Winters received $5,000 from Eli Lilly in October. Freeman received more cash from the pharmaceutical industry in the last election cycle than any other Oregon legislator -- $23,500, including $7,500 from Eli Lilly. The Indiana pharmaceutical company and manufacturer of the name-brand insulin, Humulin, wrote him a check for another $2,000 just five weeks ago.
Both Winters and Committee Chairman Sen. Alan Bates, D-Medford, spoke out about not believing everything they read or are told.
Bates wanted an amendment calling for a work group during the interim which would look into whether Oregon should supercede the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and further restrict biosimilar, or generic, drugs that replace complex biologics like interferons or simpler organic formulas like insulin. Winters agreed, saying the biosimilar issue needed more discussion.
Bates was dismayed his amendment faced resistance and eventually he dropped it, but said that an informal work group would still study the issue.
Bates had been reassured that the Eli Lilly amendment would be removed from HB 4110 and the underlying bill would pass on to the full Joint Committee on Ways & Means. He said the bill needed to be sent to the Capital Construction Committee to work out a technical problem.
He suggested there was no point in stripping the amendment in his committee because it would have to be done again the second time around.
Eli Lilly Money Spread Wide
But Bates has now lost control of the bill, and while both he and Steiner Hayward haven’t taken any money from Eli Lilly, the Capital Construction Committee reads like a who’s-who of the pharmaceutical firm’s favorite Oregon politicians. With the exception of Rep. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, every single one of the lawmakers on that committee pocketed money from Eli Lilly in the past three years, some just days before the session started.
Campaign finance records indicate that Eli Lilly targeted legislators who sit on the Committee for Ways & Means, which controls the state's purse strings, while ignoring health policy leaders like Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland and Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson, D-Gresham.
Since October, Eli Lilly has poured $28,000 into the campaign accounts of Oregon state legislators. House Majority Leader Val Hoyle, D-Eugene, who pushed for the Eli Lilly amendment in the House Rules Committee, took in $9,000 in the last election cycle, more than any other lawmaker.
Just before Christmas, Hoyle accepted an additional $3,500 gift from Eli Lilly. Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, got $3,000. House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, found $2,500 under her tree, bringing her total to $5,000 since 2011. She is co-chair of the Capital Construction Committee. Her fellow co-chair, Sen. Fred Girod, R-Stayton, received $1,000 on Jan. 30.
Bringing up the rear, two other members of the capital construction committee, Rep. Nancy Nathanson, D-Eugene, and Rep. John Huffman, R-The Dalles, each received $500 for their campaigns. The last member, Sen. Richard Devlin, D-Tualatin, took $2,000 last election cycle, but none in the recent flurry from Eli Lilly.
Old Insurance Plans Extended Again
The human services budget committee also attached an amendment to Senate Bill 1582 that will direct the Department of Consumer & Business Services to extend old health insurance plans not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act for up to three more years.
The substandard health plans will only be available to existing customers, and the agency can only extend the plans to 2017 if the federal government gives such authorization. Earlier, Insurance Commissioner Laura Cali gave insurers the option to extend their plans until the end of this year.
Nathanson said the amendment was necessary to help consumers since Cover Oregon is still struggling to be functional.
“I don’t take it lightly that things are not moving as quickly as we would have liked,” said Nathanson. “We stand firm in our decision to move in the direction that we are set.”
SB 1582 is the bill that approves funding for the extension of the high-risk Oregon Medical Insurance Program, which provides coverage for people whom regular insurers refused to sell policies due to pre-existing conditions such as cancer and heart disease. That program was scheduled to end at the end of last year, but Gov. John Kitzhaber stepped in with an executive action, extending the program through March 31 to make sure these people would not lose their health insurance.
Jesse Ellis O’Brien of the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group told The Lund Report that many of these substandard plans have annual limits on what an insurer will pay, and some do not cover essential health benefits like hospitalization or prescription drugs.
“They’re almost certain not to cover mental health services,” O’Brien said.
Freeman opposed the amendment because he objected to the Legislature ceding its authority to a state agency or the Obama administration: “Hope is not a strategy,” he said.
Toxic Toys Bill Dies
Senate Bill 1569, which would have required manufacturers and distributors of children’s products to disclose their use of 33 toxic, bioreactive chemicals, died for a third straight year after it once again lacked enough votes to pass the Senate, where Democrats have only a 16-14 majority.
Bates promised the issue would reappear in 2015, and asked the business community to negotiate with SB 1569’s supporters, including the Oregon Environmental Council.
The bill had been stripped down from its original version, which would have required toxic chemicals to be phased out of children’s products and replaced with safer alternatives.
Similar legislation passed the House by a wide bipartisan vote last year, but both the Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans are much more conservative than their House counterparts. An early supporter, Sen. Brian Boquist, R-McMinnville, reversed his position last year and the bill also died without the support of conservative Democratic Sen. Betsy Johnson of Scappoose.
Johnson, who crossed party lines to kill a raft of Democratic bills last year, is a millionaire heiress daughter of a timber industry tycoon who was a Republican state lawmaker. She represents a rural, but consistently Democratic, district in northwest Oregon, including Astoria.
Ironically, some lawmakers opposed toxics disclosure by calling it a federal manner, while supporting restrictions on generic insulin and biosimilar drugs that go beyond the regulations of the FDA.
Christopher David Gray can be reached at [email protected].
Image for this story by Padraic (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr.
It is startling to see the influence of money in politics when it comes to the Eli Lilly amendment. When Eli Lilly stakes its turf on the complex issue of biosimilars, we know that the Knight Cancer Institute is watching closely. The cluster industries will metastacize where they can get big tax breaks--near Genentech.
Unfortunately HB 4142 A appears to have died in commmittee--even though it passed with bipartisan support in the House. This bill would have designated the Rural Strategic Investment Program go to real rural areas, not the fake ones contrived by a December 1, 2002 time stamp. 5302 urban industrial acres that were added to the Metro Urban Growth Boundary since 2002 are eligible. A rural SIP is highly favorable for large property investments because of a caps on property taxes and community service fees for 15 years.
Never mind if the "rural" property is in the city of Hillsboro and in the Portland metro.
$433,136,472: That's the amount that Genentech invested in Washington County since 2010. Genentech, a corporate citizen residing in the City of Hillsboro, has 12 more years to benefit from these “rural” tax breaks. The current property tax exemptions were valued at $23 million over the 15-year life of the deal under Oregon's Strategic Investment Program. But that could be just the start!
With only 15 of 75 acres developed, "The long-term potential for an expansion of that facility, into R&D or other areas, is relatively high," said Arundeep Pradhan, vice president of technology transfer and business development at Oregon Health & Science University.
Genentech is a subsidiary of Swiss-based Roche Pharmaceuticals. With new cancer drugs, Roche sees 2014 profit. "Net income last year jumped 18 percent to 11.4 billion Swiss francs ($12.7 billion) from 9.7 billion francs a year earlier, Basel, Switzerland-based Roche said in a statement today... Andrew Weiss, an analyst for Bank Vontobel in Zurich. “That’s a lot of money,” Weiss said. “Here you see the power of the business model.”
From this table, we see Roche's CEOs have been amply rewarded. That's $146,605,514 from 2003-2012.
If Genetech shutters its doors in Oregon, it could pass this tax break on to the next big corporation. Corporate heirs need not be related as the will of current law gives this subsidy immortality. No doubt that “rural” lands that adjoin Genetech will attract cluster industries that insist “Me too!” for tax breaks. Just as drug companies will say, "Me too!" when patenting "biosimilar" cancer drugs.
It seems that Washington County corporations are just learning a trick of the trade, with Intel and Nike mentors nearby. In this subsidy tracker, "Subsidizing the Corporate 1%," Intel is #3 and Nike is #8. Woo hoo!
We can follow the money to both parties when it comes to corporate welfare.