Pharma Lobbyists Are Behind This Shadowy Group Attacking Drug Pricing Reforms

Seniors 4 Better Care is not really a seniors group — it's a front for a lobbyist-led shell group.

YouTube / Seniors 4 Better Care

By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge

If you're breezing across YouTube videos and podcasts these days, you've probably come across ads that warn vaguely of the “Biden pill penalty” and are sponsored by something called Seniors 4 Better Care. We took a look to see who’s behind the group and what they want, and we found a trail of “dark money” tied to pharma and health care lobbyists.

Seniors 4 Better Care is not really a seniors group, but rather a front for a lobbyist-led shell group called the American Prosperity Alliance. Formed in 2022, the American Prosperity Alliance does not reveal its donors, has no employees or office, and appears to function as an entity to purchase ad spots while hiding the true source of the money.

According to its tax filings, the group’s president is lobbyist Steve Stallmer of Envision Strategy LLC. Stallmer lobbies for a wide range of clients at the federal level and in New York state including clients like the Healthcare Association of New York State and insurer MVP Health Care. The group’s treasurer is Parker Hamilton Poling, a former chief of staff for Republican former Rep. Patrick McHenry, who has lobbied on behalf of pharmaceutical companies Genentech and Cencora. Its secretary is Brian Berry, a lobbyist for Chinese-owned biotech company Complete Genomics and a founder and managing partner of the strategic communications firm Vision360 Partners.

The website of Seniors 4 Better Care doesn’t provide much detail around what it calls the “Biden pill penalty,” which appears to be a reference to the Medicare prescription drug negotiation program that was signed into law by President Joe Biden in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Among other steps to lower drug costs, the law requires the secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate prices with drug companies for select, high expenditure drugs covered under Medicare Part D starting in 2026 and Part B starting in 2028. After decades of stagnation in Congress, the law marked the first time that the government was allowed to directly negotiate prices with drug companies. The savings pile up: HHS announced in August that the program would save Medicare billions of dollars a year, and that Americans who pay out of pocket for drugs would save billions of dollars more.

One reason Seniors 4 Better Care is ambiguous about the program may be that negotiating drug prices is wildly popular. More than 8 in 10 voters support giving the government the ability to negotiate some drug prices for Medicare recipients, according to tracking polls from the nonpartisan health policy organization Kaiser Family Foundation—including some 77% of Republicans. The same poll found that more than half of voters over 65 think that allowing Medicare to negotiate pharmaceutical prices will lower the costs of prescription drugs.

President Donald Trump previously had some strong words for the pharmaceutical industry’s massive price gouging. In 2017, Trump said of pharma companies, “They’re getting away with murder,” and that, “Pharma has a lot of lobbies, a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power. And there’s very little bidding on drugs.” But on his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order reversing a 2022 Biden order that directed the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to create new payment and delivery models that would lower drug costs for people in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Seniors 4 Better Care has ramped up its spending on ads that appear to be targeting Trump and his inner circle with the message: “Biden Broke Medicare. But President Trump can fix it.” Public inspection files maintained by the Federal Communications Commission show that it began buying airtime in the Florida and Washington D.C. media markets earlier this month in its first buys since last summer. The group’s Florida ads target viewers in the West Palm Beach market near Mar-a-Lago. Similarly, this month it launched its first Facebook ad buy and spent a six-figure amount on YouTube ads, buying ads on the platform for the first time since 2023.

The group’s website claims that Biden “raided Medicare, made premiums skyrocket, and drove up drug costs,” and that the “Biden Pill Penalty is already slashing the development of affordable drugs.” The accompanying video, in tiny text, cites an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Tomas J. Philipson, an economist at the University of Chicago and a former member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2017-20 who has major conflicts of interest with the health care industry. Philipson is a managing partner at a health care venture capital fund that has made more than two dozen investments, and his research center has been funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. Koch Industries oversees a venture capital arm that invests in healthcare companies. Philipson’s op-ed continues what ProPublica described in 2017 as a conflict of interest between his scholarly and commercial roles, one that is often undisclosed.

Very little is known about who funds the American Prosperity Alliance. As a nonprofit organization it is not required to disclose its donors, and the only major organization that has named it as a grantee is the American Action Network, a nonprofit that is deeply tied to House Republican leadership. In 2022, American Action Network disclosed a grant of $5.5 million to the American Prosperity Alliance for “issue support.”

The American Action Network has been funded by companies such as Dow, ConocoPhillips, Eli Lilly, and CVS Health, as well as trade associations including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the Business Roundtable. Both PhRMA and the Business Roundtable represent pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson that had the prices of some of their high-cost drugs negotiated down in the first round of negotiations with DHHS. In previous years’ battles in Congress over drug price legislation, the American Action Network, led for years by Republican operative Dan Conston, launched multimillion-dollar ad campaigns against the Democrats’ proposal, echoing pharma industry talking points.

In addition to spinning up the seniors-themed front group, the nonprofit American Prosperity Alliance has served as a major “dark money” conduit for donations to Republican super PACs over the past two election cycles. In the 2024 cycle, it gave more than $21.6 million to a super PAC called America

Fund PAC, which in turn funneled millions of dollars to pro-GOP super PACs. In the previous cycle, the nonprofit gave millions to groups like Conservative Americans PAC, a “pop-up” super PAC that spent to influence voters in House Republican primaries.

Big Pharma’s profits fuel billions of dollars worth of stock buybacks and dividends and lucrative pay packages for their executives. A report released last year by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Democrats found that in 2022, ten large pharmaceutical companies pocketed more than $112 billion in profits.

Americans pay far more for prescription drugs compared to other nations: for 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services found that U.S. prices were nearly triple the prices in 33 wealthy countries. The Senate HELP committee’s report highlighted that Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb made more money from widely-prescribed treatments, like J&J’s arthritis treatment Stelara, in the U.S. than in the rest of the world combined.