Cassidy Sends His Resume to Big Pharma

Sen. Bill Cassidy is looking for a job.

This week the chairman of the Senate Health Committee released an 88-page draft bill to overhaul the 340B drug discount program. Strip away the title and the section headings, and what's left reads less like legislation than like a cover letter. Addressed to Big Pharma. Signed by a man who will be unemployed in a few months.

Cassidy lost his primary, and he is on his way out the door, the lamest of lame ducks, with only a few weeks left on the legislative calendar for this Congress. He knows this bill is going nowhere. No markup. No path. No time. And he is still asking the public to send in comments by August 28, as if any of it is real. It is a swan song that will be completely ignored.

It is not a real bill. It’s a plea for a job. It is a self-interested swan song that will be completely ignored.

Look at what the draft would actually do. It would let drug manufacturers claw back the 340B discounts that keep rural hospitals and safety-net clinics open across his own state. It hands Big Pharma the rebate scheme the industry has wanted for years. It is everything they have lobbied for, bundled up and stamped with a committee chairman’s name while he still has a chairmanship to stamp it with. That is not policy. That is a job application.

Cassidy’s betrayal is breathtaking. Before politics, Cassidy spent years as a doctor at Earl K. Long, the Baton Rouge charity hospital that cared for patients who could not pay, and he later co-founded a free clinic for the uninsured. The safety-net providers his bill would hollow out are the likes of his own former employer. He understands better than almost anyone in the Senate who these discounts keep alive. Yet he is shamelessly selling them out anyway.

While Cassidy polishes his credentials with Big Pharma, a bipartisan group of his colleagues called the Gang of Six — Sens. Tim Kaine, John Hickenlooper, Tammy Baldwin, Shelley Moore Capito, Jerry Moran, and John Boozman — have worked to modernize the 340B program the right way. Cassidy did not join that effort. He launched his own self-interested solo audition instead.

There was a version of this where Cassidy would spend his final months in office with some dignity, finishing the job for the patients and providers who counted on him. He has chosen a different, disgraceful exit. He is choosing to spend the time he has left not serving but ignominiously building a case to his next employer.

Everyone in Washington knows exactly what he is doing with this bill. Big Pharma is hiring. And Bill Cassidy is applying.