Billy Tauzin, one of the highest paid lobbyists in Washington, is resigning as president of the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group amid internal disputes over its pact with the White House to trade political support for favorable terms in the proposed health care overhaul.
Billy Tauzin, outgoing official.
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As the industry’s top lobbyist, Mr. Tauzin brokered the deal last summer with the White House and Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, to limit the drug industry’s total costs under the proposed health care overhaul to $80 billion over 10 years.
The announcement of Mr. Tauzin’s resignation is the latest unexpected fallout of the Republican upset in the Massachusetts Senate race, which abruptly transformed the health care overhaul from a near inevitability to a daunting cause.
Like almost every other seasoned Washington player, Mr. Tauzin bet the health care overhaul was an unstoppable train, so he wagered it was better to get on board early — only to watch it come to a screeching halt.
The trade group issued a news release on Thursday night confirming Mr. Tauzin’s departure, effective June 30. In the statement, Mr. Tauzin, a former House representative who is 66 and has survived intestinal cancer, said, “My health is excellent, and I look forward to exciting new challenges ahead.”
Under his direction, the trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, backed up its end of the deal by spending more than $100 million on ads to promote the overhaul.
But after the reform stalled, some industry leaders felt the trade group had gone too far giving concessions and could lose on some important legislative issues without gaining the political protection it had sought.
The nature of the group’s deal with the White House was initially undisclosed by Mr. Tauzin and the Obama administration. But when Congressional liberals began to press to take more out of the industry — potentially by allowing importation of cheaper drugs from Canada or decreasing the industry’s years of exclusive rights to biological drugs — Mr. Tauzin publicly accused the White House of failing to hold up its end of a quid pro quo.
The arrangement, confirmed by a White House official and later in Congress, became a source of controversy among liberals who faulted the administration for giving away too much and Republicans who had traditionally been supported by the pharmaceutical industry.
In an interview with The New York Times in July, Mr. Tauzin said, “Our goal, I described it almost five years ago when I took over, has been to end this business of PhRMA having enemies. Disease was our only enemy. And to have a nonpartisan organization. And we got there just in time.”
With Mr. Tauzin in charge, the trade group donated more money to Democrats running for office and added former Democratic officials to its lobbying forces.
Mr. Tauzin later said the White House had asked him to negotiate over the health care overhaul because, “They wanted a big player to come in and set the bar for everybody else.”
“We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’ ” he added. And, under pressure from his own board, he warned the White House not to back away.
Kathleen Jaeger, president of the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, which sometimes crossed swords with PhRMA, was surprised Thursday when informed of Mr. Tauzin’s plans to resign. “He has done a fantastic job for the brand pharmaceutical industry,” she said. “Billy is a master of politics and policy.”
Officials for the White House declined to comment.
Christopher A. Viehbacher, a board member of PhRMA and chief executive of Sanofi-Aventis, said in an interview on Wednesday that he still held hope the health care package could pass Congress. “The most important thing to me in this whole process is that PhRMA was not the bad guy,” he said, adding, “It has not been without its political cost because it is actually difficult to be bipartisan in all of this.”
Mr. Tauzin was a House representative for Louisiana for a quarter-century, first as a Democrat and then after switching to the Republican Party in 1995. He served as chairman of the House Commerce Committee when it recommended expanding drug benefits to older Medicare recipients.
Leaving for the PhRMA job after that, Mr. Tauzin drew some criticism for his Medicare work in Congress, but he insisted the PhRMA job had not been offered to him until he had decided to leave Congress and accepted another job, with the motion picture trade association.
Mr. Tauzin announced his new job and left the House with a year left in his term. In 2007, the Democrats added a new provision to the House ethics code known as the Tauzin rule, which specifically bars a lawmaker from negotiating deals for future employment while still on the job.
Mr. Tauzin said he took the PhRMA job after he learned he was diagnosed with cancer.
In the PhRMA statement, he said, “In January 2005, after a full year successfully battling a killer cancer, I was given a second chance at life, and appropriately chose to commit my next five years to the lifesaving work of the people whose miracle medicines had just saved my own.” He said he was leaving after fulfilling his five and a half year commitment to the job.
