Think of it as your Monday morning milk.
"Milken, of junk bond notoriety, back as medical legislative advocate" by Sheila Kaplan STAT September 14, 2015
WASHINGTON — A 1980s icon of excess, onetime junk bond king Michael Milken pleaded guilty in 1990 to six criminal charges stemming from securities transactions. He was initially sentenced to 10 years in prison, ultimately serving 22 months and paying $1.1 billion in fines and settlements.
But that was then. Today, after years building a reputation as one of the nation’s leading medical philanthropists, Milken has quietly added politics to his portfolio.
He has pushed his agenda with a muted public presence, one that stresses quiet messaging over press releases and networking over campaign contributions. His goal is passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, a bill that would accelerate regulators’ review of new medical treatments and boost funding for the National Institutes of Health by nearly $9 billion over five years.
Milken has hosted retreats and receptions from Lake Tahoe, Nev., to New York, putting lawmakers in front of renowned scientists, patient advocates, Cabinet secretaries, and biomedical industry chief executives.
And he and others from his eponymous think tank have wined and dined a who’s who of the congressional leadership, including Senate minority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat; and onetime House majority leader Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, according to current and former lawmakers, congressional aides, and others.
In short, Milken has Washington’s attention once again.
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Not everyone is pleased with Milken’s behind-the-scenes advocacy. While supporters say the Cures Act, a version of which was passed by the House in July, would make it cheaper and faster to get cutting-edge drugs and medical devices to patients, critics warn that it would create dangerous regulatory shortcuts. They fear that Milken is doing the bidding of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry’s main trade group.
“This is a bill that has many provisions that are exactly what PhRMA wants and what the device companies want,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit think tank in Washington.
At this point I have to confess a certain naiveté over the years regarding the raw powder of the pharmaceutical indu$try and I'm still astonished by it.
Milken has made no secret of his passion for the issue of medical research. His passage from financier to research champion has been long in the making and stems from his own brush with death.
A week after emerging from prison in 1993, he was told he had terminal prostate cancer and would die within 12 to 18 months.
Instead, he survived — a recovery he attributed to a combination of medical treatment and an overhaul of his diet. Milken started lobbying for research dollars, and at the same time, trying to persuade pharmaceutical companies to make cancer treatment a higher priority. He established the Prostate Cancer Foundation and cofounded the Melanoma Research Alliance.
In all, a spokesman said, Milken, now 69, has donated about $750 million to medical research and public health causes and raised $650 million more from other donors, while using FasterCures — an advocacy campaign run out of the Milken Institute, based in Washington and Santa Monica, Calif. — to reach out to scientists and politicians.
Look, I don't wish ill upon anyone and pray it will not strike me; however, the polished profile by the propaganda pre$$ of this $cum looter into a hero is a bit offensive. It's not like he climbed a mountain or anything.
Hey, considering who and for this paper is written, it's understandable but.... this whole elite class moving in circles and playing both sides of everything to steer you into the agenda they wish (or away from one that might topple their schemes) is stale. (Imho)
Crowdfunding of medical devices raises money — and questions
Good thing Milken stands out from the crowd, huh?
Milken has also worked closely with pharmaceutical firms, including the giant drugmaker Sanofi, which was the major sponsor of at least one of his retreats.
His advocacy now dovetails with the push for what could be one of the most significant, and controversial, pieces of legislation on medical research in years.
Milken declined to be interviewed for this story, and Geoffrey Moore, his spokesman, said the former financier wants to keep attention on the issue of medical research, not himself.
But Moore acknowledged that Milken’s summits and retreats are “designed to spark collaboration and ideas that propel the system forward. . . . Hundreds of members of Congress and various administrations have participated in these events.”
On Capitol Hill, drugmakers have lobbied hard on the Cures Act. Pharmaceutical manufacturers and biotech companies have also doled out campaign contributions like pediatricians giving out lollipops.
Trying to help out the dentists while creating obesity(??).
Over the first six months of 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, drug and device donors contributed $1.1 million to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and their respective leaders, with Republicans getting the larger share.
They control Congre$$!
Milken’s own campaign contributions have been comparatively modest. But his role in helping to craft the legislation has been anything but.
The sponsors of the House bill, Representatives Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, and Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, have been conferring with Milken on medical research issues since well before the proposal was drafted. This summer he has been working with the lawmakers on ways to get the bill through the Senate, said Matthew Inzeo, a spokesman for DeGette.
Milken views his activities as education and collaboration, not lobbying, his spokesman said. In fact, Milken has not registered as a lobbyist. As the head of a nonprofit, he is not required to do so, as long as he follows rules restricting the amount of time his organization devotes to lobbying-like activities.
He's a little AIPAC onto himself.
“I think he deserves an enormous amount of credit for the thrust of this legislation, and for bringing people together so that the Energy and Commerce committee had a lot of its work done for it,” said former representative Henry Waxman, a stalwart California Democrat who served on the panel until his retirement last year.
So Hank Waxman, an antiwar liberal, anti banking guy(?) was big for pharmaceuticals?
Online videos of Milken’s speeches show an advocate in his element — a lean, balding man speaking with a raspy voice, often out of the side of his mouth. But people listen.
“He is a force of nature, no doubt about that,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
(Blog editor throws hands up then drops to table. Yeah, okay.)
“When Mike says, ‘I’m having a meeting and I want you to show up,’ everybody shows up,” Collins said. “I always go to the FasterCures meeting and I always make relationships that seem to matter.”
At this year’s Milken Institute Global Conference, in Los Angeles, Milken stressed a key part of his platform, the economic benefits of federal support of such research, asserting that more than 50 percent of all economic growth in the last 200 years can be traced to advances in medical research and public health.
“We can solve these problems,” Milken said. “We have to allow science to move at the speed it can move.”
Last year, Milken testified before Congress alongside Collins on the importance of supporting medical research and the 21st Century Cures Act.
Upton, the bill’s cosponsor, closed the session by taking note of the outsized role played by the onetime junk bond king, crediting him with many of the proposals in the legislation.
“Michael,” he said, “we stole a lot from you.”
Not as much as he stole.
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As usual, Globe sour.
Related: Boston watchdog takes aim at rising drug prices
The sectional placement $ays it all regarding whose "health" we are talking about. Is it really worth reading?
Also see: Drug War Retreat
After a regrouping, an offensive has begun:
"Obama has tacitly allowed legalized marijuana to spread drug use on a widening scale, undermining prevention and treatment. Now drug gangs flourish in a legalized-drug environment, spreading addiction throughout America. Meanwhile heroin production is surging in Mexico, in a more pure and potent form than ever. And the world’s greatest opium producer, Afghanistan, supplies most heroin found in Canada and is poised to enter our communities as well."
Just say no. That's the best advice I can offer, and if the person pushes it on you they are not your friend.
As for the "war," "we" will never win it until people face up to the fact that it is government intelligence agencies (black money for black budgets) that are the biggest drug smugglers, they abet favored operators (reserving the right to double cross for political and public relations purposes), and launder the money in banks to keep them afloat -- all the while "law enforcement" is funded to fight against it.
Cui bono?
