Senate Republicans filibuster prescription drug bill

The bill allowing the federal government to actually negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug costs just ran aground in the Senate. The vote was 55-42 in favor of cloture, with the usual Republican suspects joining the Democrats (Hagel, Snowe, Collins, Smith, Coleman, and Specter), but not enough to stop debate. Tim Johnson wasn't there and Harry Reid voted no for procedural reasons. So realistically the Senate is three votes away from invoking cloture.

It's always tough to get Congress to rewrite a law once it's been passed. This is a textbook example.

Apparently, leaders are negotiating "off the floor" on how to move forward with the bill. I'm not sure how you could have any compromises here. What, are you going to set price floors? It's ridiculous that the largest collection of bargaining power in health care cannot use that leverage to get a positive result for their consumers. It's nearly unprecedented. How many businesses supported by Republicans maintain their market share by using it to negotiate favorable deals with vendors? There's nothing inherently wrong with that, for the business, the vendors, or the consumers at the end of the scale (unless the savings aren't passed on to them).

I don't know if this effectively kills this legislation or not. It can certainly become an issue in some of the hotter Senate races. The votes by Domenici and Sessions and Dole and others come to mind.

UPDATE: Sen. Byron Dorgan's speaking now about "cloture petitions" that Democrats are needing to file to debate anything at all, needing to vote on motions to proceed to debate anything at all. Senate Republicans mean to shut down the governing body. See yesterday's White House-engineered stoppage on the intelligence reauthorization. I think the strategy is to claim that the Congress is doing nothing under Democratic leadership while Republicans do everything to ensure that in the Senate. It's getting so you can't get anything done in America anymore. Sigh.