Brainstorm Health: Pharma CEOs’ Midterm Money, Parker Institute Investment, Merck Pfizer Combo Treatment

Happy Friday, readers! This is Sy.

The pharmaceutical industry has persistently been one of the biggest sources of political money in the country—perhaps unsurprising given the billions upon billions of dollars potentially affected by government policy.

Drug companies and their allied trade groups pour buckets of funds into specific policy fights. For instance, the industry pulled off a major upset in California back during the 2016 election by defeating Proposition 61—which was meant to cap the state’s reimbursement levels for certain treatments—after spending well over $100 million on the issue.

But individual pharmaceutical CEOs dole out plenty of cash themselves to their favored parties and causes. And a new analysis by MarketWatch, fueled by data from Open Secrets, sheds some light on exactly where the money is going among S&P 500 companies’ leaders.

The MarketWatch report considers both gross amounts of money donated for the 2018 midterm cycle and the partisan tilt of said donations. For instance, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos is, by far, the biggest spender on the list with nearly $10.2 million in contributions—but $10 million of that was to the nonpartisan veterans’ charity With Honor Fund.

Breaking the donations out with partisan lilt built into the methodology paints a more interesting picture. And biopharma executives are among the biggest spenders when you consider ideological leanings, according to the report.

For instance, Allergan CEO Brent Saunders, Abbott Laboratories chief Miles White, and Thermo Fisher Scientific head honcho Marc Casper personally gave between $90,000 and $103,000 each to almost exclusively Republican partisan groups. The only heavily Democratic-oriented chief executive from the drug industry was Regeneron’s Leonard Schleifer, who donated $120,000 through the end of August. Express Scripts’ Tim Wentworth, Celgene’s Mark Alles, Pfizer’s Ian Read, Amgen’s Robert Bradway, Eli Lilly’s David Ricks, and Merck’s Ken Frazier (who harshly criticized President Donald Trump’s comments about racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia), each donated between $112,800 and $250,000 to a mix of partisan groups—though highly skewed towards the GOP.

Business leaders regularly donate to all sorts of causes and organizations. But the direction where the money flows can, on some level, be telling.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and read on for the day’s news.

Credit: Fortune

via USAHint.com