While the health care and insurance industry funnels millions to astroturf organizations to promote mob thuggery at health care reform town meetings or millions in prevaricating ads to kill any legislative proposal that benefits the health and well being of the common good, President Obama has had many meetings with that industry's top executives in order to placate them or try and limit their obstruction to even nominal health care "reform."

It's not a pretty picture and exposes Obama's streak of hypocrisy regarding government transparency that has become another broken campaign promise.

Sam Stein writes at Huffington Post: "...The records show that, from early February to late June, the White House has invited 15 of the health care and pharmaceutical industry's most powerful players.

"The president's meetings were handed over to the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which had filed a lawsuit seeking the information. But the disclosure came roughly 50 minutes before the president hosted a prime-time news conference on the topic of health care reform. And the White House communications team reached out to the press corps about their plans for releasing the records several hours before they ever touched base with CREW, an official with the group confirmed. In short, the timing and process seemed geared towards diminishing the story's coverage.

"Nevertheless, the names and dates provide a window into how wide a net the president has cast in his efforts to bring all parties to the table and craft health care reform. Many meetings involved a group of industry executives coming to the White House together...

"...the Los Angeles Times published a story revealing that the Obama White House was refusing to release records of meetings it had allegedly held with 18 private health care industry executives (the number ended up being 15). Later in the day, CREW filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security seeking to obtain those records.

"The story was politically damaging. As pointed out by Josh Orton at the site MyDD, Obama's campaign website still lists his pledge to do away with excessive government secrecy. And in an interview with the Huffington Post, CREW's chief counsel, Anne Weismann, declared that Obama's refusal to release the names of health care executives mirrored the much-maligned, closed door energy policy task force led by former vice president Dick Cheney.

" 'People wanted to know who Cheney had met with in formulating the Bush administration's energy policy and we want to know who the Obama administration met with in formulating their energy and now their health care policy,' said Weismann. 'It is all the more critical considering the debate going on right now and the push to get health care done quickly. I don't know if you can actually distinguish the two [Cheney's energy task force and Obama's health care meetings].'

One of those avaricious executives with whom Obama met was Billy Tauzin, former member of the US House of Representatives, and now president and CEO of PhRMA, a pharmaceutical company lobbying group.

Big Pharma has made gazillions by keeping the cost of drugs as high as possible for a long as possible, while feeding at the government trough through such programs as Medicare Plan D. It spends millions to defeat health legislation for the coomon good while It gouges consumers and makes medicine unaffordable for millions who require medication for their health and to live.  These drug companies' orporate profits are always more important than humanity's needs. 

Any "negotiation" or "co-operation" with the government is usually to Big Pharma's benefit and profitability.

Johann Hari at The Independent writes about the hidden truth behind those drug company profits.

"Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

"Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

"But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

"As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

"We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.

"Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."

"There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."

"Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.

"It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.

"Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.

"The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: " 'It would be like patenting the sun.'