Direct democracy on the line in Michigan

People love housing now. New York Dems, not so much

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

I don’t like working from home, but one upside has been that I’ve been able to avoid the worst of the various flus, coughs, colds, and other illnesses that happen to be going around the city at any given time. Now that Shea is in daycare, the opposite is true; there are six kids in his class and they together somehow carry every airborne disease known to man.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been hit with a very nasty cold, which has me pretty much useless. Cold medicine doesn’t seem to do much, possibly because the placebo is gone now that I’m aware that decongestant apparently doesn’t work. I’ve been working on a story about the pharmacy industry for a while now, and for all the time I spend waiting for medication, I’ve been pretty surprised by what I didn’t know about places like CVS and Walgreens. On a practical level, it has me reconsidering a few things.

• Because CVS is vertically integrated, it gets the best deals on prescription medication from its own Pharmacy Benefit Manager, Caremark. PBMs tend to give preference to big retail chains, especially ones that are part of the same parent company and can help keep consumer costs inflated.

• They also like to jostle independent pharmacies around on prices for medications, to the point that the independents sometimes actually lose money when filling some prescriptions.

• With that in mind, I’m going to buy over-the-counter medication from independent pharmacies whenever possible, because mom and pop stores don’t have to negotiate in the same way and can actually make a decent margin on them.

• Being a pharmacist absolutely sucks right now; they’re underpaid and overworked to the point of passing out from exhaustion on the job. It’s annoying to wait a long time for your prescription to be filled, but don’t blame it on the people behind the counter — blame it on their employers for refusing to hire more of them.

Now that I’ve gotten my winter public service announcement out of the way, let’s get to the news.

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Speaking of Drug Prices….

💊 🔨 The Biden administration plans to seize the patents on certain medications from price-gouging pharmaceutical companies.

The federal government spends billions of dollars every year on research that leads to medical breakthroughs, which are turned into medications and sold by private companies. Under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, the government has the right to clawback the patent to a medication developed by federal research and allow other pharmaceutical companies to manufacture it.

Known as “march-in rights,” they’ve never been activated by the government, but drug prices have never been higher. The pharmaceutical industry will fight the plan, of course, but there’s also a lot of unknowns that need to be answered: While the plan right now has a framework for which medications to consider, it’s unclear how they quantify descriptions such as “extreme, unjustified, and exploitative of a health or safety need.”

At the very least, it will give drugmakers something to think about when they ponder how to price their drugs.

Midwestern Populism

🧸 🛠️ There were some positive developments for working families in Michigan this week.

First, to stay on the pharmaceutical theme for a moment, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of a law that shielded drug companies from lawsuits over harm caused by their products. Michigan passed the law in 1995, making it the only state in the nation that protected pharmaceutical companies from accountability.

Second, the Michigan Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit that could put an end to a uniquely anti-democratic process that puts a chill on direct democracy.